text /// Chris Rusak

02-14-08

Getting somewhere.

As you can see to your right (where an image of a work in progress lies,) things in the studio are coming along. I finished an edition and I’m letting it sit so I can come back and reprocess it all for presentation. I started a reference print yesterday and worked some more on it today. It is a color chart of the inks I use to implicate many concepts of color theory in my work. Even a child, when she opens a box of crayons, sifts through them in virginal delight and begins to scribble madly just to see the effects.

Color charts are nice because they tend to be art for art’s sake. They may feel profound but they are simple. A grid in color. It is the negative of a piece of graph paper filled in by an artist like a child with a box of crayons.

What makes color charts feel so profound, though? The sense of order, construction, ruled chaos, harmony or dissonance, structure, and an intense feeling of overstimulation; many possible feelings can be pulled from a simple display of squares of color in a grid. We use grids to organize things: information, office cubicle, cities. Perhaps, when one views a color chart, when one stands in front of the house paint color chip display at the local hardware store, we begin to relate to the organized colors and the emotions those colors are associated with. What kind of room do we want to live in and what color are we going to be wrapped with?

We begin to see red as love aligned with the green of envy. We see the bright yellow glare stand next to the muted and demure violet. We see everything at once ordered in any fashion and believe that order itself is possible for us.