Components of Paint

Free Culture Remix
Artist Statement

Painters use paints, often mixing and remixing various colors to create new colors, which are to be applied on canvases. Resultant colors will be already known to the world and probably will even have names or specific numbers to them. However, these consequent colors could be something that came out casually by applying little bit more of, for example, white or yellow to green paint. It’s kind of hard to come out with always-same exact colors every time a painter mixes different colors on a palette. Surely, it might look almost same to most people but still will not be 100 percentages same since human eyes can’t catch that minute differences so well. Yet, to look at the colors in a broader sense as, for example, twelve standard rainbow colors rather than going so deep into varying shades of each of these colors, there are limited numbers of colors that human eyes can distinguish from light and so artists are using and sharing same colors to represent often similar things. Nevertheless, we cannot say that they are stealing others’ ideas on how one have used colors to represent resembling things.

Maybe there really is nothing that can be said as original in the world, just as Lawrence Lessig commented in “Free Culture.” Thus, the concept and the view of colors on how they have been used to represent certain things could be seen as unoriginal. However, it still at least will be seen as a creative tool by which we are able to struggle to create something new in the future theoretical view. There is nothing new, original or creative in present time and reusing ideas from past could be seen as just repeating what had been done before. Nevertheless, as everybody will know, these repeated works are not that same from previous works just as mixing colors wouldn’t be exactly same from previously mixed colors. Going back to history and inspired by past ideas will help to create similar but definitely different work and in this sense, the new work is creative since it came out with different result from the same source. Using colors that all others also use could be said as not unique, yet it is very fun to see how one expressed more significant feelings than others by using the same tool called color. So the color is a method that gives chances and possibilities to us, reopening our imagination. Moreover, this tool is actually composed of many invisible ideas, words, languages, etc. which are swirling all together as components of paint that exist similar to atoms. Whensoever painters mix different colors in a paint bucket, they also unconsciously mix and apply these invisible components on the canvas. So in other words, every artist are using same tool, same components, to make creative works of art and because of this above reason, process is hard but not impossible. We just need to paint and reorder the invisible ideas on the canvas until we success. We only need to revolt by grabbing something out of a deep hole that leads to the past through the paint method, since so-called components of paint are transparent creative elements that are waiting to be noticed again.

After reading the “Free Culture” by Lawrence Lessig, I created a derivative two-dimensional digital image that suggests about invisible components of paint and necessity for connection to the past, and I depicted this notion in an abstract way. Overall image of strong colors represent mixture of different paints and the center black image stands for some kind of a hole that leads to the history. It is a black hole that has sucked all the creative sources and there is a big need for eruption.

It wouldn’t be possible for me to create this derivative work if Lessig hadn’t waived some of his copyrights since I took some of his writings from the book. But would it make any difference if I made those quotations harder to recognize, either by lowering the opacity or breaking up words. Would it be more of “fair use” than non-regulated use of the book? It’s so complex for me to decide.

Image is posted on the web Components of Paint