The Elegant Void
written by mandybrigwell
The Elegant Void
It was strange to us at first: a new configuration.
A desperate re-conditioning; a stroke of dark luck.
But watch in secret, because it's ice and it's oil,
and it's 'temperatures plummet'.
It's one more slickblack treasure; it's all headlines.
Like we should attract industry or attention;
a night's depleted plutonium sun,
for we must attract something.
Good fortune smiles down regardless and salutory.
The moon approves, and holds us in an osseous cradle,
and we are rocked by a bone white man in his cups.
An icy-white appeal: Literal white-knuckle.
And in this all, somewhere buried,
the sky a mere square immeasurable above,
is the keystone of something long-forgotten.
A desperate 40 microns sacrifice, and the end of all that is.
So little now, and outside is rime.
Breath strikes a white feather, and here I think of heaven,
make tracework patterns of posies on summer glass
to plan for the limitless and old age promises.
Arpeggios of light, cascading upwards.
The tracework burns cold where I touch, makes spidercracks in glass,
websilkholes and fingermarks creased with ridges of ice,
a subtlety of havoc conformity, unshakeable.
And thus comes the knell mention—
the revelation of heat-starved glass—
and all that is embodied in a wish for sun-cracked sand.
Shall we, together, die holding hands, as it should be,
lying in place to defy this winter-sun's midnight,
or part like the waves to reveal the ice beyond?
Quick - choose,
before the temperature drops.
A lonely sun - a thousand million bursts of love - looks down,
bolstered through an artificial winter's night
by an industrious encouragement;
shines harder for the occasion: makes an effort.
For its children must,
surely,
enjoy a little sunburn,
if they are so keen to
endure.
About the Piece
The heart of an atom laid bare; an act of creation filling an expanding universe; an exaltation of planetary masses orbiting a central point. It's a matter of perspective and scale, as rotation and simple geometry combine to produce a spiritual successor to my piece ‘A Clock at the Heart of the Universe’.
The main aspect of ‘The Elegant Void’ is a coloured expanse of noisy canvas, a simple grainy motif onto which equidistantly-spaced rays of geometric shapes are overlaid in varying order.
Palettes
To begin with, colour choices are made. Will the piece be monochrome: a simple palette of greys allows purest black and white to pop out of the piece. Alternately, a focal point for a palette is selected, with no particular weighting. Random values, instead, choose a range for the palette: a tight focus on a central range of colours, or a wider scale, allowing a burst of contrasting hue to expand from the centre, bringing variety and rarity. Additionally, the palettes are further branched into dark and light versions, most easily seen by examining the halo-like background towards the edges of the canvas.
The Canvas
This piece uses varying aspect ratios, with a simple 1:1 being common, but with other options in varying proportions. Ultrawide variations are possible, but rare.
The canvas may also be split, with a horizontal or vertical split being rare, but still more common than the quartered canvas. These splits take the form of an inverse or complementary palette, and work together with the possibility of a focal offset. Ordinarily, the piece takes place around the centre of the canvas, but this point can be shifted along the axis of the split. Where no split takes place, the focal point is, somewhat rarely, allowed free rein to roam across the canvas, though it tends to avoid the edges and centre.
Rendering
The creation of each ray takes place sequentially, overlapping what came before. Because of this, render order affects the finished look of the piece, and takes place using four potential methods. Two are essentially equivalent, being clockwise and anti-clockwise, whilst the remaining two provide the option for a random order, or a sorted shift through even spokes followed by odd. The start angle is chosen randomly, and thus some pieces will be even, symmetrical and ordered, whilst others will descend into off-kilter chaos. A further teasing towards chaos may also be added to the rendering of each ray, as a subtle and slightly-random shifting is applied to the points in rare cases.
Behind the main spokes, an arrangement of geometric background serves to lighten and darken portions of the canvas. This halo may comprise squares or circles, with the latter being far more common. The halo is an easy way to see the effects of a lighter or a darker canvas: the piece may darken or brighten towards the edges as large-scale texturing is applied.
Interactivity and Soundtrack
As is normal with modern browsers, the soundtrack cannot be played automatically, and nor should it be. The keystroke 'm' will begin playback: an original electronic piece composed to accompany the artwork.
The high-resolution version of the piece can be saved by pressing 's', whilst 'shift-s' will save the canvas at the scaled, internal resolution of the browser. Titles can be displayed with 't': this title is not part of the artwork; whilst it will be saved using the canvas method, it is not added to the high-resolution piece.
