Discount ALs: https://lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/e5da0ac3-d896-4e2f-8545-1357e01a283a

Noodlz: Vintage Gen Pop

Illustrated article on Medium: https://medium.com/p/1efa809b1170

Nostalgia for the future

Noodlz builds on ideas I began exploring in Fontana and Velum — specifically, how to represent advancing and receding pictorial space and dynamic movement, using statically drawn graphic elements. In contrast to this spatial push and pull, I add the application of algorithmically worn surfaces and aged colors. These two devices aim to create a tension between instantaneous 3D dynamism and a 2D canvas that indicates a slow, subtle process of attrition. The resulting juxtaposition is characterized by a pictorial space that’s simultaneously punchy, fun and explosive with a rendering that’s very flat, measured and methodical. A paradoxical expression that aims to feel both of-our-time and digitally native but simultaneously time honored and nostalgic.

Playful Vintage Pop Vibes

I particularly love some of David Hockney’s stage landscapes from the 90s. He pushes and pulls the space with a witty and artistically intelligent use of scale, texture, overlap, and skewed perspective. I love how these apparently simple, almost naïve forms have a jovial interplay and yet occupy very distinct space giving each work presence and power. This sense of structured freedom I feel in Hockney’s work is also something I aspire to express in Noodlz. I don’t want the elements to seem too self serious. The name Noodlz is deliberately unpretentious to reflect the streamer festooned pop vibes of the project. For me there is also something inherently exciting about bold colorful pop art contrasted with a weathered vintage surface. Worn Lego boxes from the 80s and retro posters of race cars also trigger this feeling in me — most likely because these are the things I loved in my childhood. It’s quite possible my art is an attempt to recreate something magical I felt growing up, but I feel it’s probably fairly universal to a certain generation. Noodlz is a melding of many personal feelings and inspirations that I hope are clear in the art but, by nature, are hard to put into words.

Algorithmic immediacy

Creating a sense of immediacy in generative art is an interesting challenge. In painting and drawing a direct and unhesitating stroke can express an effortless and spontaneity that’s hard to parallel using algorithms. My solution is to keep primitives uncontrived and true to my medium which is scalable vector graphics. Simple circles, spines, rectangles, flat fills, and linear gradients are used to flesh out the main structure and space in these compositions. It’s important to me to try and preserve the inherent beauty in these simple forms rather than bending them into more subtle mark-making that hides the graphical immediacy that’s authentic to the medium. In contrast, the actual composition of these primitives can be very complex and dense although a product of simple geometric rules. These geometric rules I believe provide another type of directness as the underlying logic can be intuited on some level. Immediacy for me is all about revealing the process and at least creating the sense that the primitives are laid down in an algorithmically uncontrived manner.

Inspirations of Effortlessness

Throughout his life Matisse went to great efforts to remove any evidence of excess labor in his works, wanting them to look free and spontaneous. Finding an equivalent to this in generative art without the work becoming overly simplistic is a fascinating challenge. Matisse’s cut paper was something I was thinking about when deciding to keep the shapes clean and undistorted when building the primary motifs in Noodlz.

Howard Hodgkin is a contemporary inspiration for this project that also seems to conceal the labor in his work and builds his compositions from very direct and uncontrived daubs and strokes. There is an obvious reference in Noodlz to his inclusion of the frame in his works. The frame in Hodgkin’s work becomes another direct primitive that is not fussed with yet adds another rich layer of texture and structure.

Polymorphic Gen Art

Polymorphism has a number of different meanings in different disciplines but I feel the term would describe where I am trying to go with Noodlz and in my own practice in general. Polymorphic comes from the Greek roots “poly-” (meaning “many”) and “morphē” (meaning “form” or “shape”).

My collection chatFUKR from 2024 was a revelation for me in that the figurative nature of the project forced me to combine many algorithms and resulting visual languages together in single compositions. At the time I felt that figuration might be the glue that enabled me to break free of a more homogeneous approach to making gen art, but as soon as the project was dropped I started to think how a similar approach could be applied to pure abstract art making. The desire and ambition to marry a complex array of elements together in a single work is something that’s been in my artistic DNA for decades. This approach has typically meant developing the essential building blocks (primitives) of my art over a number of years and exploring different ways to combine them.

It strikes me that artists typically develop devices, symbols, palettes and motifs over decades and don’t start from scratch with every work. A mature and sustainable practice for a dedicated long form generative artist might be to build a library of algorithms that can be evolved slowly over successive projects, finding new ways to combine them into compelling fresh expressions.