just_left_alone_01

I couldn't resist keeping a couple of the pixelsort patterns from ASDF in this piece. All the same, what I needed and kept was mostly the gradients, the colors. In a certain sense - it's much harder to be an artist when you have total and complete freedom. To make whatever you want is freeing, but at the same time it's a great leveler: everything seems equally brilliant or stupid and all mashes together into one undifferentiated "but why that?" mass. I needed the ASDF algorithm here to give me some things I could and could not use. I especially like using it on images that I would absolutely refuse to use if they were recognizable, and so it forces me to use the unrecognizable, the zoomed-to-the-point-of-primitives, the bare colors and distance between them. That kind of structure forces the artist to take what they have and the need to arrange them aesthetically presents itself.

Sometimes I think we all find that our work, our life in general is just taken up by other people. I don't think you have to be an "introvert" to need a moment to yourself just to function sometimes. You have to build networks of trust to have this. Maybe your work will leave you alone if they trust you value what you're doing for them, that you do that thing because you respect both their schedule and yours. Moving away from in-person office life means this value is being explored again in earnest for the first time in a while. By that same token I think all of us, to one degree or another, need at least a little time to be left to our own devices: to work at our own pace on whatever project we feel needs attention. For most of my life this has been difficult precisely because there's an assumption that during working hours you are working on the thing you do for work, or that when you're home you have to arrange to have that time to yourself. It's my own fault that I find it hard to negotiate self-care - because the truth of the matter is that negotiated self-care makes me conscious of the arrangement and then less free to be alone, as if you're only truly alone when no one is aware that you're alone. Is that a neurotic feeling? Probably, but that doesn't make it less of a need.