Organic Chaos

Since the late '80s, I've played in various local rock bands, and one of my favorite aspects of being in a band has always been the improvisations or jams. We used to warm up with these at the beginning of rehearsals or unwind with them at the end.

For this piece, I wanted to capture the spirit of those jams, starting without a specific direction and allowing the composition to develop organically based on the images I added to each layer.

So, today there won't be any detailed explanations or breakdowns of the work process, because the decisions I made were quite spontaneous and unplanned. The only guideline was the initial one, much like the start of a jam session, where one musician begins with a guitar riff, a bass line, or a drum groove, and the others build on it. In this case, the groove that started my improvisation was a texture of a somewhat decomposed tree trunk with soil and plants growing within it.

With this starting point, I followed the rhythm by working exclusively with textures from the plant kingdom, except for the stages where I enhanced colors or tones and added final touches. For those, I allowed myself to use other types of textures. Here are some of the textures that played a role in the composition:

Finally, after adjusting blending modes, opacity, and other layer settings, and adding my usual textures for color and patina, I reached the end of my improvisation with this "organic chaos."

Click on the image to enlarge.