An art

I made "an art" to put on the wall in our school room.  Because the room is full of varnished wood furniture, I decided it would be a painted piece.  The chair below it set the scale for the size. The rest of the room is very organized and regimented and visually weighty, so I wanted to do something in a looser sort of style, and much lighter, in a textured sort of way.

These considerations led me to playing around with string and paint left over from my wall doily project.

I got out rubber gloves and a piece of giant graph paper, turned the ball of string into a looser ball of string, and kneaded paint into it. It would have been better to make a looser coil of the string, tying it in a couple of places, and to make the end more findable; it ended up rather tangled, and untangling gooey string was a challenge, although I was able to get it mostly straightened out.

Then I started laying the string out on the paper in a big oval shape, in a loopy sort of way, around and around. At this point the toddler woke up, so I pushed through the rest quickly, ending by patting the string down hard onto the paper to make it all cohere.

When it was dry, I tore the paper away from the outside edges, but not from the center, which shows some interesting marks from being touched by the painted string.

I hung it up in its place, and it does all right there as a prototype--it has given me some additional and better ideas.