Brad Hampton

My current painting work emerges through a process of painterly "stigmergy" - a kind of swarm intelligence with each step directly informing and directing the next. From initially drawing and painting on paper, lines become forms which grow through enlarging and redrawing, sampling and mathematically dividing. These steps in turn systematically inform the next- to creating prints of existing segments, tattooing them to each other, painting washes and drawing over those while following the forms and directives of the process until imagery is built up into episodic panoramas and sealed within a varnished outer atmosphere.

The antecedents of the work draw from the expansive, inky scrolls of Great Age Chinese landscape painting and diagrammatic abstraction, childhood entomology, plate tectonics, the petroleum industry's hold on paleontology, weather supersystems, nuclear seepage, particle swarm theory, speleogenesis, transparency in jellyfish and the inner workings of air conditioners. My work creates scenarios where we can contemplate the new vistas - an overlook onto science's unrelenting invasion of the body, the IV drip of technology into contemporary art and life, the aberrant mutations of nature in a landscape marinating in t...