Working with Random
Periodically you will come across a piece of art that looks like it was cobbled together randomly–the various elements are all different and there is no order to the placement or arrangement. When a piece is truly created with pure randomness, we tend to find it unappealing and often baffling. But then there are those pieces that look random and yet we find ourselves drawn to it anyways. There is some beauty or underlying order we sense in it. We find this quite often in natural settings where beauty can be found in what would seem to be a random arrangement of mountain peaks, of fallen and scattered leaves on a forest floor or of erratic tree branches reaching out in every direction. The reason such seemingly random and chance compositions are found to be beautiful rather than just an incomprehensible mess is because all the elements we are looking at have a purpose and follow an order dictated by the physics and life cycles of our world. This tends to be the same reason art work that looks random can still be beautiful and appealing–because the piece was created with purpose and the elements were chosen with an underlying theme that gives the elements cohesion.
If you look closely at a good piece of art that appears to have a random composition or random elements, there is usually a common thread (or two or three) that brings it all together. For example, this bracelet created by Donna Greenberg looks to have just a bunch of scattered, random elements laid around the flat surface but there are a couple of things that make it cohesive. What would you say that is?
There are two things here that I think are primary to making this piece work. One is the limited color palette which sticks with variations on blue and blue-green. Had there been a wider array of color, the piece would have appeared a bit more chaotic. Not that portraying a bit of chaos is always a bad things but what a different feel this would have to it!
The other thing I think brings this together is the flow of lines, all running in more or less the same way, undulating counter clockwise from the inside towards the outside on the bracelet’s surface. This makes it feel that all the random textures, stippling, embedded beads and many colored metallic flakes are moving around the piece in a coordinated dance. It also gives the bracelet a very graceful sense of movement one might not expect with so many random elements.
Donna works more with randomness than with well-ordered patterns but there is always a sense of purpose and connection between the elements in each piece she makes drawn from organic inspirations. Go ahead and have fun honing your eye on what makes randomness work in more of Donna’s work on her Flickr pages.
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