MAZE02
©2012 Craig Ashby
7.75” x 9.375”
Collage

The second of the MAZE Series was as difficult to make as it is to remember. MAZE02 started out with me using four of my favorite black and white images. All of which were destroyed due to me not understanding the difference between the Cut and Cut Edge functions of the plotter/cutter.

Quickly I had to regroup from the sadness of loss and ended up cutting from two images of Natalia Vodianova as Little Red Riding Hood and two images from a great Lanvin advertisement. Even this cut provided problems. I had to find and cut another crop of the Little Red Riding Hood because the machine lost its mind. I nearly lost mine as well.

The resulting final image is not the sum of four great images. The colors are nicely contrasted but it doesn’t achieve the necessary wholeness to make the piece great. Not a failure but not outstanding for the first quarter.

When I revisited these pieces a few months ago in preparation for this series, I had to redo all the fills so that each piece never touched another piece of the same cut. Technically it’s called four-color theorem and it was difficult applying it to mirror images. It took weeks to do all forty.

I have mentioned this as a problem in my one-off self-portrait cut that was a fast experiment to see how this idea would work and if the machine could handle it. Picturing the flipping process is impossible. It adds a huge random element that sometimes works and other times doesn’t. The only way to remove that random aspect is to use the same maze with no mirroring. Boring. I will take my chances.