Arrays of Sketches
The series Travels and Encounters ...
... presents combinations of colours whose distribution is too complex to be decided when actually painting with acrylics on the canvas. Studies are necessary, and these are done with the computer, with tints only approximating the final result, but giving me the ability to make a choice.
A program I wrote for the machine does the job, while I mow the lawn or cook the meal. In the canvas Nestor Burma à la Côte d'Azur, for instance, there were 144 possibilities :
For the encounter of the names of Hernan Cortès and Montezuma, a decision had to be made between an horizontal or vertical division of the background, and for each of these partis, 48 possibilities had to be examined :
96 Noches tristes. 1.The Place. 2.The moment. Cibachromes on aluminium. 2pc. 120x80. August 2002.
Making allowance for the rules of chromatic composition I set for myself, there would normally be 24 permutations of colours for the background, to be combined with 24 permutations for the figure. It adds up to 576 digital sketches.
576 Encounters of Edith Piaf and Miles Davis.
Cibachrome on aluminium. 240x240cm. November 2004.
Having made use of those juxtapositions in space, I thought it would be interesting to arrange those studies as a sequence in time. Five couples of names are displayed here. For each, one sequence varie the figure on a stable backgroung, one does the contrary, and another varies both rapidly.
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The series of sketches 576 encounters of 'Edith Piaf' and 'Miles Davis' was to be seen until april 27, 2008, at the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Verviers, as my participation in the exhibition Le Cube au Carré.
Next to it is shown one of its offsprings, La Vie en Rose.
To know more about the why and the how ... : 
