This slideshow "Trickle" continues the play with alcohol inks and synthetic paper, this time with the addition of paint brushes to apply some of the inks. The results do not look that different. I will be wearing gloves for future applications though so as not to stain my hands with drips from the bottle onto the brush and elsewhere. This work is part of the series related to using "common art" to deal with the SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19 pandemic. As people are getting vaccinated, the return to a pseudo-normal is under way...gradually...reasonably. Many of us are engaging in the home improvements and repairs that were put off. This work does not have a visual that is called "Trickle," but that may be for sometime later.

1. Trickle
A beginner’s play in alcohol inks,
watercolor,
(non) synthetic papers,
and digital image editing…
Shalin Hai-Jew
May 2021

2. 2
Cluster

3. 3
Bread

4. 4
Floating

5. Trickle
• “Trickle” is the latest in the alcohol ink “common art” series in a time
of recovery from the SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19 pandemic. The series
was started in January 2021. Each slideshow is to be seen as
companion pieces to each other.
• Perhaps it is only now that I’m realizing that these works are maybe a product
of the mental relief from the direction turning in the pandemic.
• Some of the works here look like “mood” pieces, those that evoke a
certain feeling.
• Perhaps it’s because the works are fairly abstract.
• It turns out that solace comes in many forms and activities.
5

6. Trickle(cont.)
• Finally, I have started using some of my paintbrushes for applying the
alcohol ink on synthetic paper.
• I drip the ink directly only the brush fibers.
• Dilutions seem easier using paintbrushes.
• The paintbrushes enable more texturing.
• I like the subtleties that can be created with different textures to represent
the skies.
• I may have built these paintbrushes up in my mind because I put off
using paintbrushes for four months now. Before, I only went with
drips, compressed air, rubbing alcohol for dilution, white crayons to
control for seepage, salting the ink, and other approaches before.
6

7. Trickle (cont.)
• Initially, these visuals created using paintbrushes and alcohol ink on
synthetic paper read more like watercolors.
• When I look more closely, during scans, the alcohol inks are not denatured in
their interactions with synthetic paper. Many of the bubble and water effects
are still there.
• The uses of paintbrushes create the sense that the inks take
somewhat longer to dry, as if there is some additional capability and
control to move the alcohol inks and the pigments.
• That is totally subjective, though, and probably the difference when one is in
the driver’s seat or one is in the passenger’s seat.
7

8. Trickle(cont.)
• The various inspirations for these works seem to be nature…and
ideas…and moods, in that descending order.
• It helps to attune…to find inspirations.
• Accidental creations are also not uncommon. Serendipity is an influence in
the space.
• The postcard size synthetic papers that came in the most recent batch
of art supplies are becoming my favorite.
• The size makes it easier to create a scene, with less ink.
• And there is a naturalness to the size. This reminds me of an artist friend of
mine who generously creates postcards every year to wish his friends a new
year. He is a person I’ve known since I was 14 or so…and has been a friend
since.
8

9. Trickle (cont.)
• I have an appetite for strange or novel visual effects. I want to see what
the digital image editing tool can do. I want to see things that haven’t
already been created.
• It is easier to riff with where a digital work is going while enabling backing all the way
back out of one sequence or another.
• In digital image editing, it’s all about the original seeding image…and then
all the variations and choices into the digital form that the work will take.
• Curiosity drives all of this. I want to stay limber and go with wherever the work
“wants” to go.
• I’ve learned it’s pretty easy to break an illusion. One rotation, one color substitution,
one shift of hue and saturation, one color inversion, change in contrast…and the new
image can be a visual revelation…or it can be a total or partial fail. Illusions are hard
to maintain.
9

10. Trickle(cont.)
• So how long can one claim to be a beginner? I think it takes years to start
to learn something, to be an apprentice to the materials and the visual
ideas.
• And yet, it has taken many years just to learn the digital image editing…to novice
level.
• The work is not ex nihilo but close.
• One of the works in this slideshow is given a name of an oil painting I made
years ago while in the early years of my university study. The work has long
disappeared, and it was a very different work than the one here. But in
remembrance of that work decades ago, I re-used the title here (“The
Sky…”). In the original work, the sky was in turmoil, too, but I wondered if
the sky might be more accurate depicted as implacable.
10

11. Trickle (cont.)
• I think about the idea of the ideal “imaginary reader” that fiction writers
often write to. This is some idealized target audience. And perhaps in
writers’ minds, this is a reader who understands them, and for whom
fundamentals do not have to be explained.
• In the real world, that person does not actually exist. But in the real world, having
space in the imagination to create broadly is important.
• Assuming an ideal viewer begins with a false assumption—of the
generosity in the art world where people give each other space to be.
People often in the real go with critique more than love, and it may be so
with me as well.
• In the world halfway between imagination and the real, workshopping involves
judgment, but the sharpness of the judgment is held in abeyance.
11

12. Trickle (cont.)
• In alcohol ink drip playing and pseudo-painting, one is never without
some path forward to create a visual. And most works have digital
variants that may be extracted from each visual. The versioning
enables salvaging of inartful (or differently artful) works.
• About this pandemic, humanity will likely split up in different groups:
those who remember and act on that remembering, those who
engage revisionist history and act on that mis-remembering and
revised narrations, and those who forget and act on that forgetting.
Perhaps there will be some with a bit of all three, with some
selectivity in some and not in others.
• Many who have selected their paths have already done so and are already
acting on that.
12

13. Trickle (cont.)
• One Saturday morning, I was experimenting with 3D shapes again and
had an image I wanted to capture as a dried flower. The center was
especially pronounced and contoured…and then it turned out that my
scratch disks were full. Once I had the issue resolved, I went back to
recreate that state…and assumed it was simply reproducible since the
inputs and processes were ~ to the steps before.
• The surprise was that I could not recreate the digital image. There is
something of a moment of perfect light, a day, a moment, for a photographer
outdoors…that apparently applies to digital image making. There are images
that may not be recouped. They are fully irrecoverable. (In the digital sense,
this is about artificial light, angles, and other dependencies.)
13

14. On white synth paper
14

15. 15
Globule

16. 16
Air Pockets

17. 17
Dilute

18. 18
Tendrils

19. 19
Deconstructed Potato 2

20. 20
Vapor

21. 21
Mystery

22. 22
Cactus

23. 23
Lull

24. 24
The Sky as He the Man Falls

25. 25
Foreshadowing

26. 26
Projectile

27. 27
Prairie

28. 28
Emerge

29. 29
Organic

30. 30
Windy Season

31. 31
Grind

32. 32
Fragrant Spring

33. 33
Whimsy

34. 34
Pollen

35. 35
Brewing

36. 36
Bright Lines

37. On black synth paper
37

38. 38
Pink Moon

39. 39
Gold Mountain

40. On digital variants
40

41. 41
Gold

42. 42
Dial

43. 43
Weave

44. 44
Ripples

45. 45
Bone Flower on Black

46. 46
Oval

47. 47
Hidden

48. 48
Moss and Fungi

49. 49
Olive

50. 50
Rumor

51. 51
Storm Pockets

52. 52
Pendant

53. 53
Misty Landscape

54. 54
Ice Below

55. 55
Marble

56. 56
Finger Painting

57. 57
Dancer’s Droop

58. 58
Scaffolding 2

59. 59
Tatters

60. 60
Of Wine and Soil

61. 61
Prowl

62. 62
Exploration

63. 63
Snow Blind

64. 64
Bounce