Horror vacui

Horror vacui (physics) : Nature abhors a vacuum.

Horror vacui (art) : The fear of empty space.

Like a sculptor who sees the statue in a block of stone or the potter who sees the pot in the lump of clay, artists see the potential. Their fear of empty space and abhorrence of a vacuum compels them to create and turn their imagination into reality. Motivation to overcome procrastination.

A social media presence is essential and Theo has recently joined a few social networks. Most of them allow for customization of the profile. Often the color scheme, background images and sometimes fonts are changeable to suit the personality of user.

Because Theo has not created a volume of work yet, we needed to produce something quickly for the cover photo on the Facebook page. By default, Facebook has this image for cover photos:

It is rather dull and grey. It cries out “replace me with anything colorful!”.

Producing Horror vacui to answer this cry was rather quick and simple:

1. Create an image 851 by 315 pixels in GIMP (OpenSource photo editing software).
2. Capture an image of pencils and a paintbrush with my Macbook FaceTime HD camera and Photo Booth.

   

3. Import the photo into GIMP and use various tools and effects to produce the art.
   1. Select the objects and move them to a new layer.
   2. Select the natural highlights and shadows of the background and render clouds/plasma and apply canvas and weave filters.
   3. Add a filters for coffee stain and torn border
      

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This work, Horror vacui, represents what the artist sees when they look at a blank canvas. The image hidden deep within the fabric is trying to break through the canvas and become visible.

Horror vacui is representative of theme of potential in Theo’s Prospective collection – art which is prophetic or predictive in nature and hints at what could be. Due to the urgency and speed of its creation, this work is not necessarily representative of the quality of the rest of the collection.