Damo

It was through Damo's lineage that Buddhism pass to Japan, which develop own its own. Thus Damo's Cave is a prequel Ryoanji, in historical time. But it is a natural forward progression of generative converge in my creative process. I have learnt a lot about coding and even more about myself. Coding has given me another form of art creation, and creation leading (moderate) success, allowed to help the needed, and explore and share my aesthetic beliefs, last but not least, I have met many mentors, friends and collectors where the lines is burry and isn't so distinct.

Composition

I recently bought two screen to exhibit my generative artwork. And also perhaps of the reference painting (no figuratively), I decide to make this piece a portrait mode. It can be seen that in my Ryoanji code, that I draw outside of the canvas. However, this created a distance afar, so I closed the perspective by rotating different Ryoanji around the portrait. I guess this create a more cave like environment than a temple stone garden. Next I explore textures by reusing each alphabets from A24Z, which recursively is Teardrop and parts of past works, 生成畫荷, 無山不似山, 4'33"', Tai-an Tea House, (un)//void//ble, but not Nothing Comes From Nothing.

With the diversity of A24Z, interesting textures appear overlapping onto the rotated Ryoanji. Perhap instead of thinking generative art as painting, think generative art as sculpture, then it is natural to reflection on ones creative process by addition and subtraction equally. And also by necessity, as I am not good enough coder to optimize the computation, the artist can just take away, voids of code. Since each rotation is a complete computation of Ryoanji, I reduced rotations of Ryoanji from 6 to 4. And I also commented out the "leaves" beyond the walls of each stone garden. While colors are forms of liveliness, I have chosen accordingly to the juxtaposition and wall/cave and Damo to only include Damo's palette. Which consists of different reds and near black. Red being his red cloak.

Palette of years

In my code, for every year that Damo has sat in his cave and wall gazing, I shift the palette by 1 place. So in the 9th year, we are back to the start, the same palette. The names palettes are just placeholders, and I pick a subset of colors randomly across various functions.

// Damo 1
  colors = {
      main: "#101001",
      bg: "  #310010",
      sea1: '#500100',
      sea2: '#700010',
      sand1:'#910001',
      sand2:'#a01000',
      body2:'#b10100',
      body1:'#c01010',
  };
  coloring = {
    main: "#A01001",
    bg: "#B01001",
    sea1: '#C01001',
    sea2: '#D01001',
    sand1:'#F01001',
    sand2:'#101001',
    body2:'#201001',
    body1:'#301001'
  };
  
// Damo 2
  colors = {
      main: "#c01010",
      bg: "  #101001",
      sea1: '#310010',
      sea2: '#500100',
      sand1:'#700010',
      sand2:'#910001',
      body2:'#a01000',
      body1:'#b10100',
  };
  coloring = {
    main: "#301001",
    bg: "#A01001",
    sea1: '#B01001',
    sea2: '#C01001',
    sand1:'#D01001',
    sand2:'#F01001',
    body2:'#101001',
    body1:'#201001'
  };

12 month in a year.

I have chosen my favorite 12 out of 26 alphabets, each becoming a months in Damo's 9 years of wall gazing. Can you spot (without) looking at code which month is which alphabet?

Damo's Cave in a gallery

Both Damo's Cave and Ryoanji will be featured in my show coming November 2022.

Damo is me