Making art with extremely different tools and media helps you take control and lose it, back and forth, over and over. I work on these paintings with brushes and pens and fingers, and sometimes my feet. Recently I’ve also been suggesting words to an AI, and we go back and forth until I get an image I like. I apply it to the painting using a reverse-transfer technique often used for shirts and stickers: I print the image on film and lay it face-down on liquid plastic poured on the painting, and when I lift the film the image transfers into the liquid, usually a little raggedly. While it’s wet I can finger paint in it, or tilt it to let it run, or blow on pigments and powders. Then I go back in with a brush. When the painting starts to feel like a problem, I photograph it and put the photo in a 3D cinema program, where I add simple virtual objects like planes, tubes, hemispheres, and algorithmic patterns. I print these back on to the real painting at a large industrial facility. This is risky because one error can destroy something I’ve worked on for months. It happened to two paintings that were supposed to be in this show. I’m dwelling on the technical side of things here because when I make work that’s pretty much my entire focus. Art lets all the big questions stow away for the ride while it goes about its business addressing immediate and tangible and formal matters.
Seth Price
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