Kernels

Tim Gaze
January 2025

Kernels is a compilation of previously published short books, focusing on my abstract black and white creations. 3 of these series purely use the technique of decalcomania.  I consider myself to be a writer more than a visual artist. The title Kernels was my attempt to find a word which encapsulated the way these abstract marks seem to work, each area of black acting as a nucleus, attracting the viewer’s eye.

Two different readers will come to very different conclusions about what they see. Just as people perceive different pictures in clouds, they also perceive radically different things in my black shapes. The human ability to perceive complete pictures in incomplete, ambiguous patterns is known as “pareidolia”. In the 2020s, psychologists and neuroscientists are conducting research into pareidolia. This word came to my attention in the 2010s, a few years after I had slowed down in making monoprints.

In 1936, a painter and Surrealist named Óscar Domínguez invented a method of transferring a free-form pattern onto a surface, which he christened “decalcomania with no preconceived object”. He borrowed the earlier term “decalcomania”, which referred to a way pre-prepared designs could be transferred to a surface, often shortened to “decals”. Other artists adopted his method, shortening the name of it to simply “decalcomania”. When I first began using a similar technique, I was only aware of the shortened term “decalcomania”. A few years later, I heard the alternative term “monoprint”, which is also an excellent description of these works, and needs less explaining.

My basic technique was to smear acrylic paint onto a surface, sometimes making marks using a hard object like a chopstick in the wet paint. I printed a back-to-front image from the paint, by pressing a fresh sheet of paper onto it. The pressing action could be a single firm touch and then lift off, or could involve dragging the paper to smear the paint, or several short touches of parts of the page, rotating the page between touches. Intriguingly, some of the resulting images resembled broken or distorted or incomplete writing. A variation was to use plastic packaging with raised geometrical forms such as straight or curved lines, pressing that onto the wet paint, then printing from the plastic onto a page. This activity held my interest for as long as I was making unfamiliar shapes which I hadn’t seen before. If too many familiar faces appeared, it felt like a chore, and I stopped.

I arrived at decalcomania under the influence of the art instruction book design by accident by James O’Brien (Dover, 1968). It explains several techniques for making random patterns, such as marbling and dripping ink. Marbling interested me, but required materials such as gum arabic and non-water soluble ink, neither of which appealed. The materials I began to experiment with, acrylic paint and a kitchen tray (the kind you’d use to carry cups or dishes), came from a discount shop, and cost very little. The paper was ordinary A4 sized office paper, recycled when I could get it. Preparation was as simple as uncapping the paint, and squeezing some onto the tray.

While each page in Kernels is intended to stand alone, some of my other published works (e.g. 100 Scenes and my sequence in the anthology Abstraction and Comics/Bande Desssinée et Abstraction) are more in the realm of abstract comics. For the comics, I selected a number of my improvised abstract pages which appear (to me) to have one or more actors doing something in some sort of surroundings. Then I found the most comfortable order in which to arrange them into a sequence. My intention is to stimulate the reader’s imagination into filling in characters, settings and actions, and derive a narrative plot from the order in which these occur.

Take a look at Tim Gaze’s Kernels →

Since the 1990s, Tim Gaze has been working at expanding the arts of writing. Among his published works are Cascade, Spraypaintings, Glyphs of Uncertain Meaning, 100 Scenes, noology, writing and the album Shapes. At various times, he has been heavily involved in genres such as asemic writing, abstract comics and sound poetry. He was interviewed by Sam Woolfe in 2022, and Buzdokuz magazine in 2021. Musical influences from dub reggae and AfroPortuguese batidas somehow affect his writing practice. Walking in forests is an inspiration to him. Tim lives in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia, on traditional lands of the Peramangk people.