Saccadism

Saccadism is a style of art developed by me.  It plays on the way one’s eyes takes in an image.  Saccadic eye movements, which are a series of eye movements that jump from one point to another multiple times per second, are how one's eyes record something presented to them.  These are sent immediately to the brain’s memory department, where it is the job of sensory memory to stitch together the disparate visions.  The intake of a moment or object seems smooth to the mind because of sensory memory, but saccadism attempts to capture those initial glimpses and present them individually - before sensory memory has a chance to quilt the pieces together for that final, smooth image.  Instead, the viewer is presented with the isolated saccades, cascading across the canvas as a dissection of the brain's vision processing methods.  Taking things a step further, the saccades are often arranged in a way to indicate motion through time, and illusions are often created by the arrangement of particular saccades.  The viewer is taken on a trip of saccadic fractalization - when looking at a saccadic piece, the eyes are pulled across the canvas in flowing motions that ghost those of the actual saccadic movements, both of the viewer's eyes and those that the artist had lain on the canvas.

 

I started this sometime in 2014, and for the longest time focused on employing my new style largely through painting.  My main medium was oil, next most common was gouache.  I kept my ink an markers largely separate, reserved for technical illustrations and cartoons.  But after a number of years, it occurred to me it was silly to only do it with paint!  Soon my markers were no longer barred.  Next I put my digital hand to work with it.  Recently I broke yet another barrier and started to bring saccadism to a more three-dimensional realm, employing large-scale embroidery and sculpting with felt and wire.