I guess I should begin with a confession. Specifically, a pattern compulsion confession. It started ten or twelve years ago with acrylics, though the mediums have shifted around in that time and my patterns tend to be less rigid these days.
The January it began I was pretty sick. To keep from loosing my mind during the endless coughing, I painted. (Yes, I wore a mask.) It gave me something else to focus on and pattern-ing required less concentration. I used brushes, torn foam shapes and anything else I could find to make paint impressions. When the health cloud lifted some weeks later I had quite a collection of small patterns on 5x7 watercolor paper. They weren't incredible but some turned out pretty fun. It was then that I developed a kinship with Kinko's. Those color copiers, with their wonderful range of enlarging and reducing options, supplied me with a good deal of layered and collage fun. My friends would likely tell you my eyes would glisten when I talked about the copy shop.
Time moved on, jet printers got better, cheaper and inks became stable. Enter the digital camera and what ever I created could be photographed, moved to my Mac, back to paper or fabric and layered again. Over and over. (It is only now that I have a printer with a scanner or I could have been doing some of that much earlier. I still don't use the scanner much, as the files are so big.) Of course the process can be reversed as well with a photo as the starting point, playing with it, printing it, painting on it, photographing that and on it goes.
What you see above began with a cropped photo of two pink heirloom roses, shot in the Port Townsend Rose Park about eight years ago. It has been a few things in that time but recently it transitioned into what you see here. Who knows what the future of those old roses holds. You have to admit, it's a GREAT time to be alive!
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