Lately, what Ive been into is a culmination of many discussions with friends on reproduction of mediums in art and music. In a meeting with Stephanie Kozick, we discussed what happens when putting objects straight down onto a copy machine beneath a piece of paper, e.g. a flower; the result is crystal clear. Listening to a musician friend’s experimentation with re-recording his band from VHS tape to a digital format, the sound was transformed into a more low-fi, distorted incarnation of it’s clean, original form. Similarly, when you run images through a copy machine over and over again, it becomes distorted and affects the composition in a faded, ghoulish way like this:

$4 in quarters and 3 copy machines later, these images took on the look of black and white versions of early century cathedral iconography. Reflecting on this concept, Ive found that the idea of repetitious reproduction in art is not a far cry from human biology: our DNA replicates, changes, and perpetuates our genes when we reproduce.

After playing with copy machines, I got the idea to add color with Prismacolor pencils, in order to make heavy pigment marks on both black and white without compromising the paper.

These were drawn while reading John Updike’s ‘Still Looking: Essays on American Art’

Van Gogh frequently made pencil and charcoal sketches of his paintings included in letters to his friends and family, often immaculately detailed with written descriptions of the colors he saw; like his description of the crowd of a Bullfight in Arles: “the crowd was magnificent, those great color multitudes piled up one above the other on two or three galleries, with the effect of sun and shade and the shadow cast by the enormous ring.” (Van Gogh, Dec 1888)