Ukraine
I’ve had these pieces sitting around for a little bit but have hesitated on posting them.
With the Russian invasion of Ukraine earlier this year, I was drawn to do some kind of art around it (as I’m sure many were). Having done it, though… It seems small. Ineffectual. I personally learned a little bit from the process of making it but in the big scheme of things it’s hard to feel like that matters.
Hence the delay in writing them up. I figured I should post, though, because I can still talk a little bit about what I learned and someone may find that useful even if the pieces themselves don’t mean much.
I had thought about doing something along the lines of my impact art, most recently demonstrated in “Almighty.” Specifically, something using the colors of the Ukrainian flag. It felt like a metaphor for smashing Ukraine, though, and I didn’t like that.
From there I moved on to giving my power drill art style a try, looking to make something resembling the flag. As I mentioned about one of my early attempts at “Legends,” I started using refillable 20ml tubes for my power drill art and the flow rate was awful. That showed again here, with the paint basically coming out as bold stripes rather than more random streams.
Discouraged, I decided to switch to sand art, which I knew I had under control. I used the power drill to spread glue on the page and then spread blue and yellow sand across it.
That was a little bit more like what I was going for, but wasn’t anything new. The process was the same as most of my previous sand art projects, such as “Spectrum.” I still wanted to do something else. I decided to go back and try to solve my paint flow problems with the 20ml tubes.
The set of tubes I got included 50 of them and I realized that gave me room to experiment. I took the caps off of six and drilled holes in them, with those holes being more like the ones in the 12ml tubes I’d been successfully using last summer. Then I tried another flag-inspired piece.
I didn’t get quite the balance I was looking for here but I like it nonetheless. It also proved that I can change the size of holes in these new tubes by drilling my own holes so I have a lot of experimenting I want to do around that.