Form and Composition Process Documentation
Initial Sketches
I started out by sketching out my ideas for active. I thought of the word “active” as entailing ideas of motion, power, and potential. I recently had seen Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, №2, which was the basis of some of my compositions, where I tried to convey a moving object as a still figure through the use of traces. Another idea of mine was to have smaller squares surround a big square as if the one big square were radiating energy. Passivity was difficult for me, which I tried to convey through a solitary square far away, or a clearly “not active” pattern. Ultimately, because I did not think any of my ideas were strong enough for active/passive, I did not follow through with this word pair all the way to the final product. In Illustrator, I chose to use idea of radiating squares as my representation for active and the idea of a single square on the bottom as my representation for passive.
The first thing I thought of when I thought of the word graceful was the idea of beautiful. In particular, I thought a spiral would be graceful. I did not have many clear ideas for grace, but I thought of stability and classic shapes. For clumsy, adjectives such as imbalanced and different were my main focus. The imbalance caused by gravity was a particular underlying idea. I chose to move on with two of my clumsy ideas, one a precarious stack and the other a single square out of line with the others, and the spiral for my graceful idea.
Rigidity for me was patterned, where one square out of place would break the pattern. I did not want to give the squares much room to move around, and to make them immutable. Rigidity had some overlap with idea of passivity for me, but invoked less loneliness. For fluidity, I thought curves would be the best representation of fluidness. I toyed with the idea of making squares circular by placing them around a circle, much as lipids create micelles in water. Fluidity also meant randomness movement, so one of my ideas was very similar to my active idea. For rigid, I tried a couple of patterns for my Illustrator version, and for fluid, I continued with the idea of micelles.
Active/Passive
The first word pair was active/passive. I did not really like this side-by-side, and after playing with the radiating squares so that it seemed as if it were radiating, I decided not to pursue this word pair. I decided that the patterned radiation seemed more evocative of rigid, so I reused the same square there.
Rigid/Fluid
For fluid I started with the idea of micelles within each other, as that to me maximized the amount of curves seen in one image. This did not really work for me, so I moved onto making various circles balanced on the page to evoke oil in water. This seemed too plain, and at the same time I was playing with the radiating squares of the rigid representation. However, the gradation created by changing the size of the squares seemed more fluid than rigid, so I tried to incorporate that idea into the micelles. After finding a suitable pattern of circles, I was led to break the rhythm of the squares in the various circles by deleting random ones. I did not think this looked very fluid however, so I tried to add some back and then disrupt the circle entirely. Ultimately, I settled on a combination of the two original competing micelle ideas — circles within circles interacting with circles within circles that are like ripples of water disrupting each other.
Because I had attempted active/passive first, I found the idea of radiating squares to be more evocative of rigidity so I began with that idea. But as that idea seemed more fluid than rigid, I moved to the idea of squares in a grid. However, as the proximity of the squares did not convey rigid to the level that I wanted, I decided to space the squares so that they were immutable with the white space, which was a separate idea of mine from my sketches. I made sure the white space was the exact same shape and size as the figure, which was also shifted so that the pattern could tesselate.
Clumsy/Graceful
My first idea for graceful was that of a spiral. The spiral would have a smooth gradation in angles and size, since “gracefulness” was evocative of smooth transitions to me. I played around with the placement of the squares and their proximity, as well as attempting to create the golden ratio in the form of a Fibonacci spiral, and ultimately decided that the third spiral was the most aesthetically pleasing arrangement, and thus the most graceful. I then considered the idea of a line of evenly spaced squares to complement and contrast my clumsy idea, but that idea did not stand well on its own as an embodiment of graceful. From there, I played with the colors in the spiral to integrate color, but decided that the plain black spiral was the most successful of all the iterations.
Clumsy started out as a precarious stack of boxes. I decided to move on from those boxes because the first word I would have thought of was “imbalance” instead of “clumsy.” I then went back to my sketches and went forward with the lone square that was different from the rest. I pushed the idea of clumsy forward with the idea that the one different square was someone who was waiting in line, then tripped to run into the others. I sought to emphasize the different square through the use of color, using red to evoke the idea of “caution.”
Figure/Ground
The idea of squares turning into other shapes through the use of white space intrigued me from my exploration of micelles. I decided to try and tesselate some squares that have been formed around a shape to be made circular, specifically that of a hexagon because it would be easier to tesselate. I found that I needed to rotate the hexagon in order to get the pattern to tesselate properly, which created a variety of triangles and rhombuses. I thought the resulting pattern was very successful, so further iterations were used to create the most aesthetically pleasing and figure/ground-confusing arrangement as possible.
