Tractus #14 Painting

Each Tractus painting is a combination of painting and drawing. Paint was applied with rollers. Drawing done remotely, deliberately hands-off, continuing my occasional experiments into remote drawing. The drawn elements in the Tractus paintings were made with a specially adapted remote control model/toy Ferrari. The adaptation allowed four marker pens to move freely up and down within their restraining pipes when they encountered an obstruction, allowing the pens to leave evidence of their capricious journey. I directed the car across a group of individual stretched canvases laid out within a large frame. The series of manoeuvres, deliberate impacts and crashes into the boundary frame forced car and pens to jump. The result of these impacts left staccato marks, especially where the canvases abutted each other and along the edges near the boundary. In addition to the staccato markings, speed, impact, and change of direction were all mapped by the pen marks. Each canvas played its individual part, yielding less where the canvas fabric lay across the wooden stretcher, more where it did not. The result is heavier lines in some areas more than others. I made interventions in the separate layers of paint and drawing by masking some areas adding more visual interruptions to the drawn line. It meant sections of lines were missing when I removed the mask, so while there is continuation in trajectory, the drawn line of the trajectory is broken. Another interruption to the drawn layers were made by partially painting over sections of continuous lines so there are areas of painted grids, as well as a mesh of remotely drawn lines. sandwiching the grid-like layers. The remotely drawn lines cross through every one of the twenty canvases in the set, but even here the lines are disrupted. Canvases were rearranged at timely intervals so that disruption in line-continuity was in itself disrupted.