Rubber Glove Angels (#1)

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.