What is Decalcomania?
French: Decalquer – ‘to transfer an image’ + Mania – ‘enthusiasm for’
Decalcomania is an artistic transfer technique in which paint is spread onto a surface and, while still wet, covered with another surface (paper, foil, cellophane, etc…) which, when peeled apart, transfers random patterns that can be further embellished upon. The technique was adopted by the Surrealists in the early 20th century to create images by chance rather than through conscious control. Curiously, the slang term “cockamamie” originates from English mispronunciation of “decalcomania”, and has come to simply mean “absolute nonsense”.
I first learned about Decalcomania while exploring the artwork of Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy. These artists produced fantastical landscapes and fractal-like fields of shapes and forms by pressing wet paint between surfaces and then peeling them apart. The properties of paint adhering to the two surfaces produces unexpectedly strange and detailed patterns. I highly recommend exploring their work.
Why Decalcomania and Lichens are connected for me:
My own experience working with “decalcomania” began during the Covid epidemic. I was trying to teach online classes to alternative high schoolers for the very first time. For my art courses, students seemed more likely to encounter “artist’s block”, so I introduced them to a modified version of decalcomania using watercolors and ink. I hoped that this raw approach would present a more fun and less intimidating opportunity to create. After all, you can’t really get this wrong.
During this same bizarre time period, I was teaching an online ecology course. I’m a hands-on, outdoor, nature-based science teacher, so this online approach to class was going to be tough for us. It seemed to me that, even though my students were stuck at their homes, they all had access to one fascinating group of organisms right outside their doors, “Lichens“.
Lichens will grow on nearly every outdoor surface in Northwestern Oregon due to the amount of rain we have during most of the year. If anything sits still long enough, even a street sign or car bumper, it will grow lichens. Lichens are not a single organism. Each “species” is actually a symbiotic combination of fungi, algae, and bacteria species, working together to form an organism that can survive entirely off of the gases and particles in the air. Similar to coral reefs, lichens represent an example of profound synergy in our natural world. When separated, the fungi, algae, and bacteria that make up the lichen simply form a mold and colonies of single-celled organisms. But, when combined, they form fantastic alien structures. Furthering their bizarre nature, lichens do not grow in tidy predictable forms. Though species are identifiable (with some difficulty), each lichen can take on a variety of forms, which become even more strange the closer you inspect them.
This unpredictable aspect of lichens directly coincided with the patterns I was producing using the decalcomania method in my art classes during the Covid epidemic. So, for me, lichens relate to decalcomania.
Below are some of my photos of lichens growing in Old Maid Flat, Mt. Hood National Forest, just north of Zig Zag.
My Decalcomania Paintings:
Like many of us during the darkest days of Covid, I needed an engaging creative outlet. I wanted to try to paint the lichens I had been observing, but the subject presented challenges that left me feeling stuck. Lichens are real, but they look too bizarre to draw or paint in a convincing way. So I decided to embrace experiments with decalcomania in order to create more abstract, lichen-like paintings. The decalcomania process, just like lichens, is synergistic by nature.
By pressing materials into relatively random layers of pigment, strange and unexpected shapes emerge, forming the basis of each of my paintings. I choose the colors, and have some degree of control over the overall composition, but the decalcomania process removes control over the production and placement of shapes within the composition. This raw stage of production produces hundreds of randomly placed overlapping translucent shapes.
Following the production of the composition, the challenge, at this raw stage, is to “see things” in the random overlapping patterns. This practice is similar to “visual pareidolia“, when a person’s mind sees distinct and familiar patterns in seemingly random stimuli, similar to seeing faces in clouds or wood grain. Once I find a pattern that feels right, I outline it with ink, while making an effort to substantiate the illusion of logical depth so that my end piece can feel somewhat 3 dimensional.
This lengthy process feels magical to me, like I am interacting with another intelligence hiding inside the patterns. I can spend a ridiculous amount of time staring into these complex fields of colored shapes, coaxing out the hidden patterns. Each painting feels like a complicated puzzle with no clear end point to achieve.
Below are samples of works in progress. They are each at the longest part of the production stage: searching for patterns, deciding what to ink, and combining what emerges from the scattered fields of overlapping shapes.
