Emily Garfield: Watercolour Imaginary Worlds
Emily Garfield is an American artist who earned a BA in visual arts from Brown University. She currently lives in New York where she has held several exhibitions of her works.
Inspirations
The artist began drawing speculative cityscape while attending the course of aesthetics in the department of cognitive sciences, in which she read a paper about how the factals might have an inherently aesthetic quality. This led her to explore the natural world and how all biological creatures evolved through patterns in a way that the artist calls “bottom-up”.
The cells of an organism have the ability to emerge, this because they follow simple rules that lead to the final result. This type of gowing can also be seen at a macroscopic level in cities and in their conformation, which varies according to the movements of the inhabitants. The artist applies the “bottom-up” process to her works.
Imaginary Maps
Emily Garfield creates as she says maps of places that she makes up as she draws. She decides in her works not to plan the drawing, but she lets her subconscious to indicate the direction to take. The artist only sets simple rules that depend on the quality of the materials she uses, which are most of the times ink and watercolor, also because both have a fact of unpredictability. Her purpose is “to grow” the design as if it were an living organism.
“I invent each place as I draw, thinking about clustering of neighborhoods, patterns of roads and the individual selective memory that an inhabitant would use to navigate their city.“
Emily Garfield
She often finds herself to realize on commission maps of real places, which is a challenge that the artist very willingly accepts. Even though she already knows what the structure will look like, she tries to make the work interesting through her unique style and techniques
Recently she is trying to increase the scale of her works by creating many small maps/ tiles that can be seen both individually and as a single large composition.
Natural and Computer Randomness
One aspect that interests the artist a lot is the difference between a spontaneous organic pattern and one that originates digitally. Garfield tries to experiment more and more in the digital field, she wants to be able to create an artwork with a computer in a random way. She delves into the new aspects of her artistic research on her blog, in which there are very interesting articles about her use of computers and robots.
The artist has decided to have new inputs through the livestream realization of many of her works. You can follow her on facebook and twitch. You can also buy some of her works on her Etsy
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Featured Image: Pulses by Emily Garfield
