| I have been creating art all my life, from finger-painting to computer illustration, from sand castles to oils and acrylics. Having been taught from an early age that creativity is paramount, that's how I've lived my life. As I got older, and my ability to manifest my imagination into reality became second nature, I started looking for something beyond my own imagination, a new approach to creativity, one that was not limited to my own imagination and the many sources of inspiration that influenced me. The first, most obvious place I looked to was chaos. This began my journeys into aleatoric art. Aleatoric art allows the element of chance to play a major role, exploiting the concept of randomness to reach artistic areas at which mere creativity might never arrive. I began experimenting with mediums and paints that were incompatible. I toyed with the concept of colloidal suspension. Oil and water don't mix so they instead move each other much the way an artists brush moves paint. I discovered a combination of paints, mediums and other elements that simulated the effects of colloidal suspension. The movements were beautiful because they were governed, not by an artists conscious intentions, but by the laws of nature such as gravity, temperature, pressure and resistance, viscosity and thixotropy. Surface tension and Newton's first law of motion were crucial factors in the marbelling effects I was seeing in that my colors, under very specific conditions, maintained contiguity even when stretched to extremes beyond what could be seen with the naked eye. The weight of the pigments themselves even played a role in the movements I was observing and, over years of trial and error, I painstakingly bdiscovered the ways each color moved in relation to every other color. Heavy elements like gold, silver, iron, and titanium sunk to the bottom but burst to the surface as the mixture dried moving the lighter pigments away but leaving ultra thin webbing, bubbles, streams and ghosts. Metallics pigments were problematic because the coarser particles tended to destroy the smallest filaments and blend everything together into mush, though I still use them carefully. What I immediately noticed was that the forms that occurred had a distinct similarity to forms found in nature. Human-like faces and bodies, animals, plants and geological formations appeared on the canvases but the details were so minute and complex that the weave of the canvas itself was interfering with the subtle and delicate movements of the paint which were caused by the infinitessimal differences in the properties of the pigments. I switched to ultra smooth masonite hardboards and I found that approximately one out of every twenty paintings turned out really well. In time I learned the properties of each color so well that I could predict, to some extent, how the paintings would come out in terms of brightness, overall hue, complexity of detail and severity of contrasts, and with an average 50% yield. The painting were far more interesting than anything I could come up with using just my imagination alone and the complexity and detail was far beyond anything executable using traditional tools and the naked eye. I ncalled my invention "oozing" because I likened the creative process to the way nature created life from primordial ooze. To this day I continue to consume art materials in large quantities nexperimenting in hopes of stumbling across other methods of creating art that cannot be created by any other known means. "What makes a true innovation so elusive is that it doesn't exist until it's given the chance it doesn't yet deserve." Then another brainstorm came. I began drawing over the smooth surface of the naturally leveled paint in fine line permanent black ink, bringing out the details and creating a unique collaboration of my imagination and nature. I call this body of work "Inked Oozings." |
RAY CABARGA
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Ray Cabarga is a featured artist and staff writer on
