Recycled Plastique

Thank you very much for visiting this collection of work, titled

"Recycled Plastique"

30 compositions and a quote bouquet

by Justin C.M. Brown

april twentytwentyfour

This project is created as a homage to renowned artist Piet Mondrian.

I was considering an homage series to various abstract artists for a while now,

but only a series dedicated to Mondrian seemed to fit my own style.

I considered Kandinsky, or Pollock, or Albers. No, it had to be Mondrian.

Mind you, I did not know very much about him, mostly from coffee-table books.

But something about his composition, especially his early abstract work,

intrigued me in a way I couldn't explain to myself. So simple. So deliberate.

It occurred to me that an artist this deliberate must have some rationale;

madness of this quality reflects a highly thought out method.

And so I set out to find out what it was, which led me to UCLA's Arts Library.

The Arts Library has become a favorite nook of mine on campus.

I often get submerged by the presence of knowledge in the larger libraries,

the Arts Library is designed in a way that would fool you into believing

you could actually know everything that was in there.

I digress... I found the exact book I needed there-

Piet Mondrian: The Complete Writings,

the 2017 volume compiled by Louis Veen (N6953 M64 A35).

As it turns out, Piet Mondrian was an avid writer and social theorist,

and he wrote extensively on the meaning behind his work.

It was eye-opening in a way I did not expect,

in a lot of ways it is more akin to a sociology text than an artist statement.

In Mondrian's eyes, his work described a future society built on

mutual equivalence between all human beings leading a

culmination of human intuition towards social progress

through abstract expressions of freedom and the vitality of life.

Personally, I found his reasoning to be quite convincing.

With this perspective closely in hand, I set upon my intuition,

and created the work you see here.

Thank you Piet Mondrian for your Art, your words, and your Ideas.

Thank you Louis Veen for your enormous labor in compiling this work.

Thank you UCLA Library for providing the resources necessary to realize this project.

Thank you to all librarians around the world for the invaluable service you provide.

In honor and gratitude,

Justin C.M. Brown, 3/26/2024

Rarely Asked Questions

What is a "quote bouquet"?

A quote bouquet is a concept I developed individually and honestly; after my personal coining of the term, I discovered alternate/similar applications around the internet.

It is a selection of quotes, made beautiful through aesthetic arrangement. It is a subjective product of the relationship between the scholarship and the artist.

It is part collage, part research, and (importantly) part citation. A quote bouquet is a medley of quotes from a single work (though it can be applied to a single topic). I think of it as a florist composing a bouquet from a much larger assortment of flowers. It is something which is individually beautiful, but thematically coherent in a way which benefits the work overall.

The citations are essential to provide context and credit because the composition of the image always comes second to the writing and publishing of the idea within.

A quote bouquet without citation is plagiarism.

I suppose the concept of a quote bouquet is a little Neo-Plastic in its own way. By liberating the idea from the page, it reconstitutes itself as an independent thought, which is then brought together with its companion writing in a way which encompasses overlapping but objectively different areas.

Through decontextualization of carefully selected passages, I attempt to retain the overall concept presented in the work while opening new parallel areas for inquiry.

[photo credit: Andrea Gambino, taken during creation of

the quote bouquet "On Becoming A Person"]

Who is Piet Mondrian?

Biography cited from Britannica.com:

"Piet Mondrian (born March 7, 1872, Amersfoort, Netherlands—died February 1, 1944, New York, New York, U.S.) was a painter who was an important leader in the development of modern abstract art and a major exponent of the Dutch abstract art movement known as De Stijl (“The Style”). In his mature paintings, Mondrian used the simplest combinations of straight lines, right angles, primary colours, and black, white, and gray. The resulting works possess an extreme formal purity that embodies the artist’s spiritual belief in a harmonious cosmos."

Reference:

Piet Mondrian | Biography, Paintings, Style, & Facts | Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Piet-Mondrian

How were the quotes chosen?

Quotes were selected from Piet Mondrian: The Complete Writings, the 2017 volume compiled by Louis Veen.

The accompanying quote bouquet draws primarily from two essays written towards the end of his life while living in Manhattan, "A New Realism"(1943) and "Liberation from Oppression in Art and Life"(1942).

I selected the passages from "A New Realism" to provide context for the style of art 'Neo-Plasticism'.

I selected the passages from "Liberation..." to illustrate the expression in Mondrian's work and the ideology it represents.

While Mondrian died in 1945, his understanding of the individual and social capacities to evolve and create continues to indicate a way to optimism which is open to humanity.

Process Notes

Part of reading Mondrian's writing was to understand the physical process he used to create his works. Mondrian would use pieces of tape to draw lines across canvas, and when he had them in an arrangement he liked, he would attach them, and paint in the open canvas. One he removed the tape, he would then paint in the black lines, so that the lines were recessed from the rest of the painting. What looks like flat white areas on computer screens is actually covered in brushstrokes (always vertical or horizontal).

To reproduce a similar effect, I painted a foamcore sheet with white paint using several different brushes. I then took ~30 photos from different distances and angles which I superimposed as a unique layer on each digital composition.

Astute viewers may note an increasing complexity throughout the compositions. My way of logically approaching creating 30 pieces simultaneously was an additive process; each successive piece adds one dividing line (one vertical, then one vertical & one horizontal, then two vertical & one horizontal, etc).

This had the unintended effect of reflecting Mondrian's tendency towards plurality over time, especially within his New York period.

[photo credit: Andrea Gambino]