Thirty Infamous Views of a Gusher

Yes, I totally stole the title of this post from Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. When I steal, I like to steal from the best.

While I was cleaning my hard drive, I ran across these images from the development of one of my pieces, Gusher. It’s fun looking back at the design process and some of the disasters.

See that first image, with the bold, graphic marks depicting the oil shooting out of the derrick? Yeah. Those bold marks looked okay on paper when I was sketching, but they didn’t translate well when I built the scene. Neither did the huge backdrop of garbage bags one can see in the third image. Using moody blue and gray clouds in the background didn’t, either. After looking at some photos of pollution in China, I decided a yellow would be more forboding and would provide better color contrast.

Then there was the oil. I’ll just put the words “particle system” and “simulation” out there and spare everybody details. It got ugly, comically so at times.

I did all that work just so I could print the thing out on fabric and turn it into an art quilt.

I’m still stitching the thing, using the stitching to create motion lines for the oil droplets and so forth. I don’t know that it’ll look significantly different after I’m done with the sewing, but I guess that’s part of the fun. We try things, see if they’re going in the direction we want or a direction we think is interesting, and we make adjustments.

Now … I just need to find some shows that want a quilt showing a guy gulping down oil and defecating out plastic cups.

gusher01 gusher02 gusher03 gusher04 gusher05 gusher06 gusher07 gusher08 gusher09 gusher10 gusher11 gusher12 gusher13 gusher14 gusher15 gusher16 gusher17 gusher18 gusher19 gusher20 gusher21 gusher22 gusher23 gusher26 gusher27 gusher28 gusher29 gusher30 gusher31 gusher32 

 

One Response to “Thirty Infamous Views of a Gusher”

  1. Caitlin O'Connor says:

    I love seeing your ideas develop! Yeah, I don’t think this one is gonna play well in say, Texas? :-)

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