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Incidentally, I was wrong to call this the world's first work of visual mathematics (assuming the name is taken as valid, which it will be now that I've used it and it is moronically inappropriate); Charles Demuth, for one, did at least one illumage whose main element was numeric. An Homage to William Carlos Williams, if I remember correctly. A big 5, I'm pretty sure, is in the foreground.
Later note: I originally had the painter as Marsden Hartley; Gregory St. Thomasino corrected me and gave me the name of the painting, which is, "The Figure 5 in Gold." For a nicely-done bio of Demuth, interesting comments on the painting that include the excellent Williams poem that inspired it, and a link to the painting itself, go to Artchive which seems to have a lot of good stuff about many other illumagists besides Demuth.
I don't think much of this work. I made it as an illustration to use against Geof--and to, once again, practice using Paint Shop. I think there are a few interesting things in it visually. For some reason, I like the break in one of my framing lines in the upper right. The other red objects look to me like they're trying to do more than just sit there on the page, looking possibly interesting, but I'm not sure what meaning they're after.
I guess I must be biased against texual illumagery, after all, because just about always, when looking at one, I immediately think in terms of what could be done to make an effective artwork out of it. Take yesterday's illumage with its A and backwards R. I keep wondering just what they might mean. Bothersomely, so it detracts from my potential enjoyment of the piece as a pure illumage. If the A and R were blobs, my problem would disappear.
I do see that the A and R could be saying something about the nullification of verbal expectations or language's pre-semantic activities, etc., but what they're conveying isn't enough, for me. In this piece.
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