Basquiat Untitled 1984

11” 9.25” I love the scribblely energy of Basquiat’s paintings, and the powerful strokes that in this piece Untitled, 1984, reveal monster faces, evil masks. I use fragments of a reproduction of one of his painting in my piece. Laid out on a yellow painted surface and overlapped by black patterns of dots and dashes printed on clear plastic.(These are positives for printing circuit boards) Arranged over this an orange fan that draws out the red and orange flames in Basquiat’s painting.

The fan’s curved fins invoke a spinning sensation and the orange copper coil of the pair of stacked stators is quite beautiful. Look closely and you will see a row of prongs. Like the center of a sunflower.

The remainder of the piece is a contrast of black and silver. A disc with metal inner has cut out shapes. The black alien face comes from the most recent wave of E-waste. The fact that current engineers are having fun with the designs poses a new element to my found art aesthetic.

Light reflects off the plastic “positives”, the Alien head, and the metal points on the strip that runs vertical down the surface.

Visual associations inform the elements I choose to use. Like the randomness of the painting fragments, the process is a scavenger hunt through my collecting of parts. I experiment with balance, scale, relationships, similarities, difference until I stumble upon the final arrangement.

Only after its completion do I realize a sort of spiral has been created. The spinning orange fan fins lead the eye to a black sphere, across dots on thin metal strips that lead to the piano keyboard in the lower left, to the mirroring strip of metal points that meet at corner of the black alien.