‘Field I’
Field I, 2019
A few years into creating the beach art I took a closer look at Islamic tile work. I had encountered the beautiful artform before, but this time around I was coming to understand it through the lens of geometry. My mind was blown by the complexity. I tried in vain to translate the construction techniques into something I could recreate on the beach but wow, I just couldn’t do it. About 10 years later I came back around to Islamic tiling, this time with techniques I had cultivated over the years.
The design in this photo is perhaps the simplest of the tile work I could translate for the beach. It took me 2 attempts to get it right. The first day I stepped into the process with a plan that seemed fine in my mind, but as has often been the case, once I was trying to do the work across a huge beach span, things started breaking down- the lines of the underlying grid that the design sits on top of were not sufficiently parallel, I was losing my place while raking the lines, and the process was taking too long- the tide came back as the sun was setting.
I tightened my process for the second day and finished just in time as the sun was setting. Because the light was getting dim the colors were muted, so I turned the photo black and white to bring the focus to the design. I am very pleased with the result.
I named the piece ‘Field’ as a reference to the idea of an underlying fabric of reality, a unifying principle. There are many things that qualify, both physical and metaphysical. This artwork is a visualization of the fractal/geometric web undergirding our reality. There may not be the awe for modern people, but for early geometers and mathematicians, their craft must have felt like pulling back the curtain of reality, revealing the underlying order. That’s what this piece feels like for me. Here’s another take on the substructure idea.
Whenever I have a pattern that is not contained and could go on as long as I had energy and time for, I like to photograph the artwork so that it continues off the edges, giving the impression that reality sits atop this permeating structure that is momentarily visible. You can see examples of this in my beach arts gallery. (In my later years I preferred to have most of my designs get interrupted by the features of the landscape to suggest that the design predated the landscape.)
A print of this photo is available in my store.