Residuum 31.4934cm2
2013
pencil and eraser on paper
This is a stain that informed the Intervention at CASO, already described in a previous post. The intervention was concluded by erasing all the applied paint marks to hide the paint stained ground in the allocated site. It was an idea to tease out, in dirtying of the ground, (by the application of paint) in order to make it look clean (hiding the existing stains by new painted stains morphing to the approximate ground area)
I felt the need to translate this process into another one - that of drawing. I wanted to see how to comment in the language of drawing on the stain itself. This is a desaturated image of the original stain, and all removal of subtle colour just emphasises that the sole subject of interest here is this particular, accidental stain.
For the drawing:
- I did not want to express any of my marks on this image so i traced the main subject to be as accurate as possible to the original.
- The original being - a printed full scale 1:1 print to the actual size of the stain in CASO
- And the drawing started
I was interested in the concept of where this piece was going more than the actual drawing itself. I tried to make a realistic drawing of the stain as possible not to show off any skill of drawing but to drain the drawing of any personal impression or interpretation. For this matter anyone else who can copy in pencil could have done this bit for me.
At a few stages earlier than the above image, the subject of this work got more clear to me and how could I re interpret the stain using the process of drawing itself (i.e. the application of marks with pencil and the erasing of the same marks with a rubber). I decided to take back the stain to its basic existence i.e. paint. Usually paint is quantified by its coverage area. On any tin it would tell you what is the surface area covered by its content volume. The most accurate way I could calculate this was using the digital image of the stain and get a count of the white pixels that form the stain and work out a sum using direct proportion.
Sum
(area of stain) =
Area of drawing = l x b (29cm x 21.5) = 623.5cm2
the total amount of pixels in original image of this same area amounts to 8696075 pixels
Selected pixels of stain (last image above) = 439244 pixels
623.5cm2 x 439244 / 8696075 = 31.49336154529486 cm2
31.4934cm2 = actual surface area of stain.
square root of 31.49336154529486 cm2 = 5.61189464845 cm
An area of 5.6 cm by 5.6 cm is erased from the drawing.
