Attack of the brain thing

Here's a psyche math problem;  Avoidance + (boredom x creative impulses) x coffee = ?   I'll back up a tad. I have two projects due very soon (one is quite large) plus a mess load of house projects I need to finish up but I just crossed the finish line on a 4 painting mini-marathon and was not really ready to lay into the paying gigs. So what happened? I solved the above puzzle by wandering down a path of idea explorations. I know the sign said to take the path of responsibility and gitterdunn but I chose to play a little and sometimes play time is a really important thing.

This tiny creative blitz started by sitting in my studio surrounded by stacks of paintings on panels that I don't really love or even like and the thought bubble appeared... "What can I do with these unwanted paintings?" My initial thought was wouldn't it be funny to take a plein air painting that was otherwise boring and add something to it that didn't belong, which I will do next, then it occurred to me I could turn this notion into an informative blog opportunity and show some glazing or reworking tricks but, no, I did not go that route either.

As an exercise I flipped through my stack of cast offs and found a few on gator board that I could cut into chunks. The first challenge was to arrange the chunks into some kind of design but I had to use all the chunks. Here's the first attempt at reassembling a tractor without the manual. It's a fun challenge in design and I found myself thinking only of design and not tractorie thoughts.

There's more but I'll get there in a minute. Next up was another iffy demo that was waiting to get tossed or covered up. 

and the same idea but in the doing it came to me that it didn't have to end up as a rectangle.

Now, granted, these aren't terrific but there's an idea here. I began to think that this would make a nice installation idea. All separate boxes, not even square boxes but wonky. To be fair, I will say I had been going through emails earlier and got one from a guy that I went to college with, San Francisco artist   John Musgrove who is doing some awesome paintings of cityscapes and fracturing them up into squares but keeping the scene intact, he has an opening this weekend.. go see or click on the link. So I'm throwing the nod to him as an inspiration on this. Should I ever pursue this idea fo' realz, I'll make sure there's no link to his work.

Next creative challenge was to take parts of both paintings and assemble them in whichever way struck my brain pan. I sorta frankensteined it. And in thinking on it, these are sort of abstract constructions, so I'll call them abstructions for now... Frankensteinist doesn't play all that well.

Then I thought, how can I make these better? Some editing would be nice... maybe a filter in photoshop to reduce the noise.

and then some more...

I'm sorta digging this direction, even if it's just creative sand box stuff. This is what I did for most of my career as a designer and an illustrator... why not invite it in to the box? And then I thought, what if I pulled a home interior off the interwebs and dropped one in place just for grins? See if it could work over the couch.

Maybe...

I need to cut back on the coffee... but until I do here are two more from some of my experiments that I've treated with various filters.

The sort of unattractive green thing (above) turned vertical, inverted and dechroma'd (is that a word?) with some minor fluctuations in color and cool scratchy stuff added. Fodder for thought.

The same image (a few versions up) with some of the chroma removed. I like this one.

More later.