Thursday, October 14, 2010

Shotgun




William S. Burroughs on his shotgun painting technique:


There is no exact process. If you want to do shotgun art, you take a piece of plywood, put a can of spray paint in front of it, and shoot it with a shotgun or high powered rifle. The paint's under high pressure so it explodes. Throw the can 300 feet. The paint sprays in exploding color across your surface. You can have as many colors as you want. Turn it around, do it sideways, and have one color coming in from this side and this side. Of course, they hit. Mix in all kinds of unpredictable patterns. This is related to Pollack's drip canvases, although this is a more basically random process, there's no possibility of predicting what
patterns you're going to get.






Out of the Closet, 1990






No comments: