Unfinished: Notes on a Broken Mind #2
This piece was left unresolved. I set it aside to focus on oil and egg tempera, and my thinking has since moved far enough away that returning to it would require re-entering an earlier frame of mind and I don’t want to go back there.
Picture-making/Mark-making:
This drawing style is the culmination of 1000s of hours of trying to draw in a particular manner. This style is so labor intensive, and the ability to make changes is almost non existent after a certain point. I admire the person I was, I like this kind of drawing style, I’ll just never draw like this again.
Concept/Philosophy:
All of my abstract work operates on two constraints:
it must extend from a prior piece, and
it must follow an internal rule or system that governs how elements behave.
Lineage
This work continues a thread from a series I refer to as Notes on a Broken Mind. In the first piece (#1), certain shapes and marks emerged that I carried into the second (#2), where they were further developed and expanded.
Gravity
In #1, elements were placed within a loose three-dimensional space. In #2, I introduced gravity as an organizing force. This is not intended as a landscape or cityscape. It is an abstract expressionist framework, but structured through the logic of three-dimensional space and downward force.
Conceptually, the work edges toward a representation of mental repetition, something closer to a looping or stuttering of thought.
I consider the piece complete enough to leave as is. The process is slow and accumulative; the medium resists revision and only allows change through addition. By contrast, my current work in oil and egg tempera allows for removal, reworking, and more substantial compositional shifts. That flexibility aligns more directly with how I want to develop the ideas introduced here.
Hydeon
I was looking at Hydeon repeatedly while starting this piece. I appreciated his video game perspective.
I came across this work by Adolph Menzel 'Altar in a Baroque Church' (unfinished), c.1880-90.
When I look at my work ‘Broken Mind #2’, I see something like this. What Menzel left behind.
