Art - Ted Silar

Rainbow Fractals: Art Made from Art

Click on the link “Graphic Art” in the right sidebar to view my Rainbow Fractals and other art of mine on Etsy.

Rainbow Fractal I Psychedelic Kaleidoscopic Digital Outsider – Etsy

$rainbow fractals$

My Rainbow Fractals are not fractals. They are simply miniaturizations and repetitions of segments of Rainbow Belt. But the principle of scale is still at work across the different versions. With each further miniaturization, the image changes significantly. I think of these as potential desktop wallpaper for those who take a little vertigo with their e-mail.

Minoan Designs

Click on the link “Graphic Art” in the right sidebar to view all my art on Etsy.

Minoan Design I: Psychedelic Kaleidoscopic Colorful Decorative – Etsy

minoan My Minoan Designs are a mixture of original images in what I hope is a Minoan style and stolen images. The Minoans from whom I stole the stolen images, however, I think are past caring. Minoan frescoes and pottery are treasure troves of design. We have so many evocative, expressive images from their culture and nothing else to go on. It is like watching an exciting silent movie with a complicated plot, big chunks missing, and no subtitles.

Thunderbird Wings

Thunderbird Wings Print Digital Art Print – Etsy

Another very minimal work, a study in triangles, my Thunderbird Wings compositions use standard Paint shapes, but, as with my lozenge compositions, I just eyeball them, I don’t measure them or regularize them. The result: imperfections. Japanese chawan, or teacup, craftspeople, I understand, make sure every cup they make has a flaw. So do I. Sometimes not on purpose. I just called them Thunderbird Wings because the triangular effect reminded me of them. Thunderbirds strike some subconscious chord in me. I hope to make some more, maybe some closer to the American Indian-style image.

Thunderbird (mythology) – Wikipedia

Cool Pools: Fractal Inspired Non-Fractal

Cool Pool I: Psychedelic Kaleidoscopic Fractal Planetary – Etsy

The Cool Pools are my most deliberate attempt at depicting some aspect of chaos theory. In this case fractals. They aren’t really fractal of course, any more than the works I call “Fractals” are, or Rabbit Dreams. But there are three or four different scales of mirror images of the central image within and surrounding the central image. Thus implying, if not truly achieving, a certain recursiveness. After three or four miniaturizations, the image pixilates beyond recognition.

Consider it a non-fractal work inspired by fractals. I call them Cool Pools because they remind me of nuclear control rods in spent fuel pools. Fukushima (as in my Rabbit Dreams) again doffing its exploding hat. Not that I know what control rods and spent fuel pools look like.

Radio Rug Prints

Blue Radio Rug Print Digital Art Print – Etsy

I started out simply trying to make rug patterns with my Radio Rug prints. I was trying to be as minimal as possible, limiting myself to nested rectangles, triangles, circles, ovals, color palette. After I looked at the finished product for a while, though, it reminded me of some art deco or futurist symbol for radio. Not that art deco or futurism really looks like this. But it is reminiscent. Also, it surprised me to discover the optical illusion that the four black diagonal lines create. They seem to enclose different planes that aren’t really there.

Lozenge Compositions

Lozenge Composition 1 – Etsy

Yes, I admit it. The inspiration for my lozenge compositions was The Jetsons. The elemental shapes. The bold, children’s playroom colors. And it is also true that I used a number of standard Paint shapes. But I disposed them across the work randomly; and I made sure they were not measured and foursquare but warped and lopsided, reminiscent of the irregular freehand elementality of a Jetsons cel.

Rainbow Belt: Native American + Rubin’s Vase

Rainbow Belt II: Psychedelic Kaleidoscopic Digital Art – Etsy

I got the idea for Rainbow Belt from a photo in a great book about handicrafts in colonial New England, The Age of Homespun, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. The photo depicted a strap of Native American design, woven in 18th-century New Hampshire of linen and dyed porcupine quills by Rachel Meloon, a European-American woman who had grown up among the Abenaki, for her neighbor, Peter Kimball, who carried it, I understand, throughout the Revolutionary War. For Rainbow Belt, I re-produced designs from Rachel Meloon’s strap, but I skipped some, made some up, and colored them differently.

I have always liked pure, traditional designs, carved latticework screens of provenance Islamic

and Indian,

Minoan pottery and fresco,

rainbow belt

Neolithic cave painting,

Anasazi pottery,

American Indian design of whatever provenance.

Most such art is non-representational, or, as with a Mimbres hummingbird

or a Levantine rock-art spear-man,

abstracted.

I do not remember the original inspiration for separating the bands of images from Rachel Meloon’s strap with bands of color-spectrum-sequenced Rubin’s vases.

I suppose it had something to do with the cross-cultural nature of the artefact symbolizing the unity of mankind. Or maybe I made that up after the fact. No tracing was involved. I drew the strap designs by hand, one by one, on an 8 1/2 x 11 piece of paper, using mechanical pencil, ruler, protractor, square, compass, and Michaelangelo-style pounce stencils. The ranks of Rubin’s vase-faces were all drawn free-hand, which is why none of the faces really match, what I like to think of as a my low-rent variation on Shi Huang Ti’s Terracotta Army.

Rabbit Dreams: Outsider or Not?

Rabbit Dreams V Psychedelic Kaleidoscope Digital Art – Etsy

Kate Davey at KD Outsider Art has published an in-depth write-up about the conception and production of Rabbit Dreams.

Ted Silar: Rabbit Dreams – kdoutsiderart

The opening salvo in my triumphant return to graphic art (after Miss McElree’s second-grade class at Albert Schweitzer Elementary School, Levittown, PA [see 1. Introduction – “Art and I” – Ted Silar]) is Rabbit Dreams.

**How Rabbit Dreams CAME TO BE**

I drew Rabbit Dreams by starting to doodle in one corner of a large sheet of drawing paper and, years later, ending in the other. It started out as a meaningless free-form salmagundi. But as I went along, it started to take on meaning. There: Fukushima. There: more nuclear power plants. There: regiments of technocratic onlookers. There: the rabbit, symbol of overpopulation. There: his nightmare, aftermath of rabbits doing what comes naturally.

I bought a set of art pencils when I started out. But half-way through, I realized that mechanical pencils worked best for the ornate fiddling I was doing. I did copy some of the images from books and the internet. But I drew all of it freehand—no tracing—and each image was altered to suit my purposes.

When I was finally finished, I took the drawing to a printmaker in Bryn Mawr and had a scan and copies of various sizes made. Then I bought some colored ink pens and started to ink in 8 1/2 x 11 prints like pages in a coloring book. In my first version, Rabbit Dreams I, I used the whole rainbow. In later versions, I found that a limited palette gave each version more of its own character. Unfortunately, the digital versions of these small inked prints are all that is left of them. The ink has faded to a pale pastel on the originals. A lesson. Never use colored ink on coldpress water-color paper. It just sinks in and disappears.

Even though I draw it, I believe that one could consider my art conceptual–because I start with a concept!

MY CONCEPT: CHAOS!

Chaos in this case was my concept. A long time ago, I read a chapter in James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science on the subject of “scale,” the idea that objects, if they are of sufficient complexity, look different when seen from different viewpoints.

One example stayed in my memory. The Paris Opera House, Gleick argues, is more interesting to look at than a New York skyscraper, because the Paris Opera House employs “scale.” In other words, view it from nearby or view it from afar, the New York skyscraper always looks the same. The Paris Opera House, on the other hand, is complex enough that your perception of it changes as you approach and as you retreat.

rabbit dreams

“Simple shapes are inhuman,” asserts Gleick. “They fail to resonate with the way nature organizes itself or with the way human perception sees the world.” The initial concept behind Rabbit Dreams was to draw something with enough complexity that it would have scale, that it would look different when viewed from near, far, or yonder.

Art and I

PsycheKaleidoscope ART- Etsy

ART and the SECOND GRADE

When I was 7, I wanted to be a cartoonist. Somehow I lost my way, straggling off from art into writing and music. Maybe when I got glasses. Maybe when my second-grade teacher, Miss McElree, put a poem I wrote (along with a fired clay monster I had sculpted) in a hallway display case for public consumption. (“Hmm,” I guess my always-plotting 7-year-old mind thought, “maybe I can make a million dollars as a grammar-school Shelley.”)

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GEORGE SEURAT, C’EST MOI

I have never, though years passed like a rush-hour stream of rattletrap pick-ups, stopped thinking up art projects, however. Finally, about 10 or 15 years ago, I said to hell with this. My original dream was to stand on a ladder next to a huge canvas, like Georges Seurat, only doodling away instead of dabbing away.

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I also imagined my huge canvas up on blocks and me rolling around underneath it on an old-fashioned, wooden mechanic’s creeper, doodling away, like Michaelangelo on his back splashing on the Sistine ceiling.

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The art of the dOODLE

I soon discovered that a regular old sheet of 18 x 24 coldpress and a sagging barcalounger was plenty enough and then some. Oddly, I found the work singularly relaxing, a welcome diversion, almost therapeutic. Even when I erased and re-drew a doodle a hundred times to get it right. Writing was, is, a challenge, difficult, frustrating, requiring intense, narrowly-zeroed-in attention. Musical practice, like drawing, can be relaxing, but composing, like writing, requires intellect, application. With art, however, I can just doodle away while my mind floats unmoored through all the tangled, ancient driftwood clattering around my brain-pool.

At present, for instance, I am working on transforming a scan of the hand-drawn Rabbit Dreams into a digital drawing. The work is laborious and very slow. Intently, slowly tracing a line with a mouse, my mind will faithfully dredge up a muddled gallimaufry of the strangest, most unexpected memories from out of the long-lost lagoon of my past.

TO BE OR NOT TO BE (AN OUTSIDER)

I think of my art as outsider art: I certainly don’t know nothin’ ’bout no art. But can you really be an outsider artist without being illiterate and raised by a horny toad in some backwoods West Virginia holler? This, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is a question for the ages.