A to Z


[Note : The colors come out truer on Macintosh browsers.]

About the painting

Background information on the painting

This painting is just an experiment and a stepping-stone for me in my attempt to examine the concept of writing. Writing needs some contrast to be discernible from the background. Colour is the most commonly-employed contrast. But it can be anything : shape, form, contour, texture, shading, and dimensionality. The other idea that I have been experimenting with in conjuction with the concept of contrast is super-imposition.

A painting that has been in mind for a while now is to use just color contrast but write all the 26 letters of the English alphabet super-imposed in one rectangular space. I attempted the idea, but I didn't put enough thought into accomodating as many features as possible (ligatures, curves, loops, and straight lines) with as few "strokes" as possible. The result was a very colorful mosaic but too fragmented to draw a viewer to a particular letter shape. The painting displayed above is a very simple implementation of the same basic idea. However, instead of 26 layers, I have a maximum of 3 layers. I am still in the process of attempting holoalphabetic paintings with more layers, with 26 being my goal.

My ultimate goal is to produce a painting with about 30 layers where 10 layers are based on color, another 10 on shape and finally 10 more on either texture or contour.

If you are familiar with work in this vein by others, or if you have thoughts and ideas of your own to share, please feel free to email me.

Specific information about the painting

The letters have been split among 9 rectangles. Each of the nine rectangles except the center one has 3 letters. The alphabet starts in the upper-left rectangle and proceeds spirally inwards clock-wise. So the first segment has A, B & C, the second has D, E & F and so on, ending with Y & Z in the middle segment (the end of the spiral). I have made one serious mistake in this painting. See if you can find it. There are a bunch of aesthetic mistakes but the mistake I am referring to detracts from what I have claimed about the painting. Email me if you want a hint locating the mistake.



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