Back in 2016 Michael Bérubé published Life as Jamie Knows It: An Exceptional Child Grows Up. Jamie has Down syndrome, and he loves to make images. Michael published a bunch of them in the book. One series was based on colored dots, row upon row of colored dots. I was particularly struck by a number of them that appeared to be random. But not quite. There was an order to them, a rhythm.
And then it hit me. I’d figured out what Jamie was doing. He seemed to be following one simple rule: Don’t put same color dots right next to one another. That rule puts constraints on what color you can use for any dot location. But those constraints result in a global distribution of dots that does have a rhythm to it.
Once I’d figure that out I wrote a blog post about it: Jamie’s Investigations, Part 1: Emergence. I went on to investigate Jamie’s other kinds of images and wrote a working paper about them: Jamie’s Investigations: The Art of a Young Man with Down Syndrome.
About a month ago I decided to make by own dot paintings. So I bought a tablet of 9 inch by 12 inch drawing paper, some colored markers, and went at it. I decided to start with one-inch dots. I drew a grid on a piece of paper and started coloring. Here’s my first imagine:
If you look closely you’ll see that no adjacent dots have the same color.
After two more with one inch dots I decided to use smaller dots, though that meant that drawing the grid would be even more tedious. Here’s the first one I did with three centimeter dots:
Jamie VI (below) also follows the same basic rule, but it appears to have a great deal of order:
I worked with a cycle of four colors, repeating the same four colors in order. Since there are ten cells to a row, that means that the cycle gets displaced by two cells when it moves to the next row. So, the no-two-adjacent rule is observed, but the repetition of a four color cycle makes for a great deal of order.
In that image I started with a yellow-red-orange-blue cycle, using it for the first four rows. In the next four I substituted green for yellow. Then I swapped in black for blue for four rows. And two more swaps for the final four rows.
In the next image I use eight colors, adding white to the palate, in random order, that is, no-two-adjacent the same.
Now we’re doing something different. I’ve dropped the no-two-adjacent constraint. We’ve got a whole lot of black dots, roughly half of them, along with a bunch of colors.
What’s going on in this last one should be obvious.
The point? Working with a limited set of materials and options and exploring what can be done within those constraints. In this case the imagery is simple: colored dots in a raster pattern using a very limited palette. Initially there is only one constraint: no adjacent dots have the same color. That’s our first two images. The third image introduces some constraints: 1) a strict color cycle, with 2) a period that is not commensurate with the row width.
And so forth.
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I know. The images leave something to be desired. I don't have a scanner so I had to photograph them. But I don't have a proper studio so I couldn't control the light and I had to hold the camera in my hand rather than using a stand or a tripod. Still, you get the idea.
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