Sunday 8 March 2009

William S. Burroughs - Shotgun Painting (Film)


BURROUGHS:
There is no exact process. If you want to do shotgun art, you take a piece of plywood, put a can of spracy paint in front of it, and shoot it with a shotgun or high powered rifle. The paint's under high pressure so it explodes! Throws the can 300 feed. 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 rather more basically random process, there's no possibility of predicting what patterns you're going to get.


I've had some I've worked over for months. Get the original after the explosions and work it over with brushes and spray paints and silhouettes until I'm satisfied. So, there isn't any set procedure. Sometimes you get it right there and you don't touch it. The most important thing in painting is to know when to stop, when everything is finished. Doesn't mean anything in writing.

'Shotgun Painting'
film via 'Ubuweb'

4 comments:

  1. Hi Mona,
    Nice blog!
    Some great stuff there, I have to say.
    I'll have to go back and follow you after I've finished typing this.
    I signed up there a few months ago, but I'm afraid I've yet to post a single bloody thing, being something of a tumblr addict these days!
    Haha
    I shall really have to remedy that in the upcoming months and get the ball rolling there, instead of wasting valuable cyberspace, and being such a slack sod. :-)

    You may wish to check out my friend's blog at some point.
    She's offline at the moment, but there's some cool posts of hers on Burroughs/Gysin and the beat generation that's worth a look at, in my opinion.
    She's here: http://sereneskunk.blogspot.com/

    Regards,

    Mark/Moggy

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have visited Loulou's site before. great blog!
    Thanx for your comment.
    regards/

    ReplyDelete
  3. Mona,

    We did a shotgun painting just recently, and posted it to YouTube.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6woWvBoPto

    Sean

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  4. Cool sean/
    I think it's ironic that towards the end of his life I would imagine Burrough's made more from his paintings than his writing!
    Regards/

    ReplyDelete