Here and there I get a request to share my working process, which I interpret to mean the “watercoloring.” I’ve been a bit resistant to doing that because I consider the process of “painting in” the maps secondary to the “designing of” the maps—the latter being the mapping process itself, which these days starts out by hand but is mostly digital. (Or, to borrow from my previous life in landscape architecture practice, it’s like production vs. design.)
Ultimately the works are about capturing spatial relationships between views (the tiles in the mosaics) rather than depicting the views themselves. I’m more interested in conveying these multifaceted geographies than expressing the qualities of individual landscapes or scenes. The process of figuring out how the pieces fit together on paper to best approximate how they fit together in real life is, for me, more central to the concept of the maps as maps—and also just more fulfilling—than “fleshing out” those pieces.
In other words I emphasize the “cartographic” process over the “artistic” process, and frankly the only reason for the first half of the “artist-cartographer” label is that I don’t think I can reasonably say I’m not doing artwork by any common understanding of the term. Obviously I make plenty of aesthetic decisions, during both the mapping and painting stages. And it’s not unusual for cartographers to also call themselves artists. But the aesthetic component isn’t what drives me to keep making these works.
(I’ll never call myself simply an artist or a painter, and I don’t call the maps paintings except when “maps” gets too repetitious. Is there some insecurity going on here too? Probably. One reason I went into landscape architecture was for the scientific/analytical component, which I’ve been trying to hold onto since leaving the profession. Plus, part of me will always wish I’d become an academic….)
All of this is a very long way of saying…I’m more interested in talking about the process of mocking-up these maps, as digital photomontages in the more recent works, than of putting them on paper. And that’s for reasons inherent to the concept and purpose behind them. But, I’ve decided to try being a little less rigid about this (or, to stop making excuses for leaving my comfort zone?) and take you through the “production” process on a new map that’s just reached the paper stage. It’s not the map that I introduced a few posts ago, which isn’t at that stage yet. But, like that one and the example above, it’s based on an “urban wild” very close to home.
This video shows the very first part of that process, and there’ll be more of them as the painting (gulp, sigh) moves forward. I will, though, take you behind the scenes on the design/mapping process too.
-Darren
Love it! Thanks for showing the step by step process you use. To me, it's like a modern art version of maps - and I love maps!