User:Timo van Dijk

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Wang Guangle - Coffin Paint

Coffin Paint is a serie of paintings based on the production idea of painting multiple layers of acrylic paint over a period of time. The piece Coffin Paint 131127 (2013) I chose is build out of strokes of white and black paint which Guangle applied two times a day, creating a pattern of thin organic lines. The power behind his series of paintings is the idea and production behind it. It is based on an old Chinese part of culture, in which the Chinese prepare their coffins during their last years.

""...the "Coffin Paints" have a very specific cultural reference: It is customary for some Chinese, as they reach late middle age, to purchase their coffin and repaint it every year, thus hoping to achieve longevity. Wang imagines that his pigment asks to live.""

-mutualart.com 2009 Link-

Guangle used this idea of painting to create different paintings with the same technique.

In a way his way of producing the paintings can be seen as a form of conditional design, where he as an artist restricts himself with a set of conditions on how to produce his work. By applying a layer of white paint, and then wait for half a day for the black layer to build up a whole canvas could be translated as a set of conditions.

Conditional Design

Conditional design is a way of designing work which focusses more on the process instead of the product. The way how the work is evolving or is being created has more importance than the medium. Proces, logic and input are three key aspects of the design. The proces is the product, logic is the tool and input is the material.

Process

For the reconstruction I wanted to use a mechanical way of creating the piece because of the conditional design. A computer works with a design of conditions which are based on logic. The movements of a brush to reporduce the work should be so simple to translate it to conditions for a robot. So I decided to use an Arduino and create a robot who could paint the strokes for the work.

I bought a secondhand printer and took the rail for the printerhead to reconstruct it for the brush to hold and move sideways. The brush only needs to move from right to left and the other way around to paint the work.

I hoped that there would be a steppermotor inside the printer to get a good control over the brush. But both motors inside were normal DC motors, so I had to find an alternative to use these and let them go into two directions, left and right. For this I needed to use a motor controller that changes the current of the electricity. After a discussion with a salesman in the electronic shop in Amsterdam I found out that all controllers are very specific and hard to fast and for cheap. After some research I found the type of the controller I needed which is a L298 H-bridge. Due to holidays from shop owners and shops who where out of stock I found my controller in Groningen when I happened to be there on a saturday.