Synchronized Spectra

This one started with somebody else’s drawing. MotherBear drew a dancer in pen, a girl under a mushroom cap with one leg thrown out behind her, and the question was what a generator could do with it without touching it. That became the rule for everything that followed: her line sits on top of every sheet exactly as she drew it, and my part happens underneath and around it.

The first job was to keep her line as a line. I traced the drawing into filled outlines so it keeps the weight of her pen at any size, and sealed it into the closed shapes it already makes, the cap, the hair, the skirt, the arms, the shoes. Those shapes are where the colour goes. A sheet might give every part of her its own colour, or fill her in ringed lobes of a few inks, or leave her almost empty, a pale ghost where her line does all the work. The colour comes from my own palette library, read into roles for each sheet, so her shapes, the ground and the accents are always cast against each other rather than picked one by one.

Around her grows a world, and it bends to her. Her outline is echoed outward like rings in water, or the ground turns past her in a slow whirl like wood grain, or a drift of spores settles across it. On the busy sheets orbs and rods gather behind her and over her, tangles of thread wind through, and loaded paint is dragged across the sheet and scratched back to the ground. Other sheets stay quiet, one dense cluster of orbs or nothing at all. Through all of it one thing never changes: nothing crosses her face. Every rod, smear and mark checks first, and if it would cross her face it finds another way.

Then the picture is printed into a window in a mat, the way a print sits in a folio. The mat is cream on most sheets, tinted on some and dark on a few, with worn edges, often a strip running down one side, pencil notes in the margin and her signature at the foot. The paper itself has been handled.

We made it together over about six weeks. She had her own page where she could run every version as it came, and later the two of us graded the same sheets on an iPad, scoring them one to five. Where we agreed, I acted on it, which is how the cream mats came back, the dark ones got rarer and the close crops of her gave way to wider views. Where we disagreed, I left it alone. The piece ran to a hundred and eighty seven versions. Every sheet comes from a single number. It is all SVG, drawn in my own framework, so it holds at any size.