Jeff Davis: Intervals Hides a Pen Plotter Drawing Inside Every Color
Jeff Davis splits each composition into bars of intertwined color intervals, and every digital work carries the instructions for its own pen plotted drawing. Intervals debuts on Art Blocks and at Heft in New York on November 20.
A color interval is a series of even visual steps between two parent colors. Intervals, the new long form series by Jeff Davis, is built on that idea. Each composition is divided into horizontal or vertical bars, with 3 intervals spanning the field. The intervals are intertwined, so neighboring colors play against each other across the whole composition.
Every output makes its own choices: the number of bars, their orientation, even or varied widths, and the colors. Some lean into a single color variant, saturated, tinted, analogous, complementary, monochromatic or achromatic. Davis moved from printmaking to creative coding in 1999 and has written 2 textbooks, Foundations of Design and Foundations of Color. Intervals reads like both books turned into a single machine for proportion.
The work exists twice. On screen, each color is a smooth, mathematically precise blend. On paper, it is rebuilt from 8 colored inks plus black: the algorithm works out how much of each ink a color needs and layers hatched lines at proportioned densities, one ink per pass, until the drawing is complete. The digital work holds the complete instruction set for its drawing and can toggle to show a simulation of its plotted companion. Davis calls the small imprecision of the plotter "the mechanical hand in the work."
Intervals debuts at Heft, 300 Broome Street in New York, on Friday, November 20, with the first 6 plots from the series on view at a 6 PM opening. The digital release comes through Art Blocks the same day, as a timed edition during the run of the show.
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