The first Rubber Glove Angel was an accident.  I am not a big fan of the modern art propensity for “accidentally” creating art because it came with a very narcissistic side narrative that artists possessed some sort of divine inspiration or magic by which this was done.  My art is highly planned, perhaps even contrived (a dirty word in modern art). That’s not to say that I don’t work through a process and often end up with something not exactly like what I set out to make.  That’s to be expected.  When imagining new art, one’s mind is not inhibited by a little thing I like to call, “reality”, and so it is not uncommon for the process to involve shifts from what was envisioned. But this one was an accident.
 
I was working on a new imaginary way to bake bread (sorry, spoiler alert…coming soon).  As part of that project, I photographed some gloves in the snow on my deck because I was planning to incorporate them into the image.  I loaded the photograph of the gloves on to the computer and, as planned, it was a very high key (white)  image.  I was tweaking the levels (contrast) and while doing so I decided to see what it would look like if I balanced the histogram so it had a normal curve (as if it was not a high key image).   In a photo of this nature this often brings out colours you did not see originally (they were just faint tints within the white).  The snow turned blue and the rubber glove turned yellow-orange.  This was close to a colour dyad and there was an instant simultaneous contrast.  So I though “maybe I can use this version…I will just abstract it by turning part of it into a mandala (taking a square of the image and copying it 4 times to make it symmetrical).  As soon as I did that, I saw this face looking at me.  For a while I thought, “I don’t make art this way”. I contemplated ditching it…but I really kind of liked it.
 
So, I reflected on what I had done.   I had created imprints in the snow with gloves and then made them symmetrical in photoshop.  Symmetrical imprints in the snow…hmmm, sounds like snow angels.  Hence, Rubber Glove Angels were born.  They are playful, can be done from home, and involve some of my favourite subject matter.  So, I decided to make a new rule: Whenever there is a fresh snowfall, I will stop my current project and go out and have some fun in the snow, making Rubber Glove Angels.

This new image continues with the theme of creating machines from things found around my house in the hopes of further exploring the concept of transparency…but enough has already been said about that in the posts below.   What really interested me about this particular image was making the robot!  I got the idea when I simply looked up at the light bulbs in my bathroom and thought, “they look a lot like robot eyes.”   The idea of building a robot seemed like a playful endeavour so that was right up my ally. That phrasing is important because I thought of it as “building a robot” the whole time.  Of course, I can’t really build a robot but this plays into the transparent/opaque and simple/complex dualities I have been working with lately. Note, once again the theme is dualities…and simulation...and humor.
 
Anyway, all that remained was to decide what this robot did.   I believe that people who work in electronic engineering sometimes build analogue to digital converters, for various reasons, so I decided to build my own. Naturally, I missed the point by making it about converting clock displays.  But then, maybe we need more clock converters since I am lead to believe that a lot a kids these days can’t read an old fashioned clock.  Older people might think being able to read a clock or answer a phone properly is important but younger people tend to prioritize the ability to use social media or shop online.  It just depends on one’s perspective…though oddly enough all of these things are easy to do.  Being able to do truly complicated things, like actually build a program, clock, phone, or… robot, isn’t really part of that dialogue. 
 
Anyway, in the end it was a fun image to make.  I like this Robot.  I think I will name him Clamps.

This large image is a cross section of a plan for a massive machine that draws spheres.  It  is a composite of photographs of machine-like items taken from around my house.   Keeping things in my house is sort of an unwritten rule I have made for my art during Covid….  Of course, I could go other places to shoot, but I like creating rules for my art…its part of the fun.  It’s my belief that creativity springs from reacting to rules and constraints.  When one is an art student one’s teachers provide these with the projects they give out.  However, I think that after that, most artists create their own rules and limitations to structure their work.  We/they might not call it that, instead using words like style, technique, approach, interests, preferred subject matter, theme, etc.
 
This image is about transparency, which I mentioned in the last blog post.  That is, its about the difference between seeing how something works and being able to make it work—and the idea that how we define this word seems to have changed.  To illustrate this I have created a transparent machine that draws spheres.  It is transparent in the contemporary sense of the word because you can see that all you need to do is put one of my monopoly plug coins in to the coin receptacle and make sure the latex intake is filled with rubber gloves.  It is not transparent because you can see all the workings.  In fact these workings are clearly nonsensical.  However, consider this: for most of us so are the inner workings of much of the technology we use in modern life.  We just need to trust that the experts know what they are doing.
 
I chose to design this machine to do a ridiculous task.  The idea here is that it can draw spheres for you so that you will no longer need to do it yourself.  Of course, the only people who draw spheres are usually those who are learning how to draw. Drawing them is usually not a means in and of itself.  It would be like creating a push-up-doing machine (hmmm….) that does your push ups for you.   Such a machine might get your push ups done but it won’t make you stronger.  Or, it could be like a book reading machine that will read your text books for you…etc. In fact, I imagine that I would make this machine available to my students so they can use it to draw the spheres required in my introductory drawing classes.  They save time and tedious shading practice while I make a tidy little profit (maybe like when a professor puts his/her book on the required reading list…its not an exact comparison).
 
In any case, this large undertaking has given me a number of other ideas for machines that play on the concept of transparency and are aimed at achieving goals with limited value.  However I have to admit they will be smaller…editing this was a tedious undertaking and it made me wish I had a “Plan for a Cross Section of a Coin Operated Shade O’ Sphere Photoshop Editing Machine” to have done it for me.

I have started some work on a very large image that is based on a Rube Goldberg machine.  It’s going to take a while.  But as I have been working on it and looking at the various parts I have been coming up with other ideas for machines…the Hydrosonic Pawnoscillator is the first one. I will probably make a few more as I continue to work on the larger Rube Goldberg machine.  I think the series will be called “Household Machines” or something to that effect.  
 
The work is based on the concept of transparency.  This is a word that has changed in meaning over time.  I believe that at one point we referred to something as transparent if we could see how it actually worked and understand it (possibly with some effort required). However, now transparent means that we can easily see how to make something work…it no longer means we understand how it works.  Consider the average cell phone…it does many things that used to require multiple devices and, in some cases, a lot of knowledge and understanding.  Most people do not understand how their phones work on even the simplest of levels. But we consider it a transparent technology because it is very easy to make it work.
 
Of course, this is part of an overall shift in our lives and technology towards complexity and information overload.  I believe about 1000 years ago St. Thomas Aquinas was able to read every book they had in Europe during his life time.  There were not that many. Now most people probably couldn’t even read all of the books related to one subject (say, art for example…).  Its just not possible to understand everything anymore and so we need to trust that those who do understand things will use their knowledge to make things work easily for us. We then only need to understand what we need to do (drag and drop a file for example).  
 
There are of course dangers to this. Sometimes people don’t listen when they are given good advice by experts because they can’t possibly understand what they experts understand.  They may then fall victim to bad advice that has been made to sound more believable, appealing, and transparent to them.  
 
This work is about that state of blissful ignorance. When our actions and ideas are not constrained by understanding, we can retreat into a world of pure fantasy where a fax machine is nothing but a telephone with a waffle iron attached (Grandpa Simpson).  In that spirit I have invented the Hydrosonic Pawnoscillator.   Its powered by water, cleanser, and vibration similar to a machine I think dentists use to clean their tools.  Its purpose is to clean Pawns since they get so dirty by being touched all the time when people play chess.  Of course, in order to make sure I have a viable business model for producing this machine, this model only cleans pawns. However, adapters and attachments can be purchases in order to use it on other pieces as well.  And in the spirit of planned obsolescence the main cleaning receptacle is made of latex and therefore, absolutely, needs to be replaced from time to time.
to edit.