the spring begins with the first rainstorm, by cole sternberg
Cole Sternberg creates environmental paintings where nature collaborates.
Paintings are left in the rain or pulled through the ocean. The resulting patterns are poignant and visceral.
This generative art series evolves directly from Cole's environmental works.
The computer plays the environment's role, taking clean colorful images and washing, eroding, and pixelating them to achieve organic-looking results.
Starting patterns were drawn from the patterns that seawater, wind, and rain once left on physical paintings.
These patterns become brushes, sometimes mirrored as in #44 (gestalt frequency: sunrise reflection),
Patterns are sometimes overlaid at a smaller scale, fractal nature at work.
(portal guidance, motivation, and scale).
Colors are sometimes inverted becoming bright and otherworldly.
Two patterns can interact, blending together or breaking like a crack in the ground.
Some alternate light and dark, experiencing day and night all at once.
Sometimes it seems the light and dark can cycle forever.
Certain patterns invoke rocks, dark earth, and caves.
Others bring sunlight bursting through the clouds.
Which structures do your eyes follow? The colors, the patterns, the grids?
Each work speaks about the competition among natural forms, colors, and patterns and the artificial hard lines and dithering.
And the impermanence of beauty.