Artist’s Statement: How I made ‘screw Moo’:
“‘screw Moo’ is a side effect of the experimental process I passed through on my way to creating this piece, which involved a great many more tiny screws filling a much more complex array of tiny holes than were needed to recreate one of my earlier pieces in this new medium. While working in Photoshop layers above photographs of the original ‘Moo’ I decided that using two slightly more differentiated typefaces would help clarify the uppercase and lowercase versions of the word when translated to this new and relatively low-resolution format. I affixed to a piece of scrap plywood a printout representing the desired configuration of screws and, using a wooden stop to control the depth of the bit, carefully drilled the several hundred holes right through the printout and into the wood. After a couple of passes at the table saw to ensure the wood was square, plus some sanding to smooth the rough cuts and prepare it, I spraypainted the front and edges of the board black. Counting out the exact number of screws required for the lowercase letters and adding a dozen more, I punched them through a couple of sheets of paper so I could get all the heads facing the same way and I spraypainted them red. When everything was dry, I went to the delicate work of hand-driving the red screws into the board without scratching their paint, then filled in the remainder of the holes with unpainted screws. Most of the creative work on this one, as with much of my work, turned out to be in the planning stages; selecting a piece of wood to use, choosing typefaces and then calculating the scale of and generating the map for drilling the holes — the rest was just carrying out the plan.”
(See also my original blog post about making this painting.)
