The above photo, “Transformative,” was my entry for the first #ds106 Daily Create four years ago. The assignment was a straightforward photo assignment: “Create a photograph that features a repeating pattern.” Simple, suggestive prompts like this were very much in the vein of the now defunct Daily Shoot. In fact, the shuttering of the Daily Shoot was the reason we started the Daily Create.
Four years later I find myself on a Daily Create roll. In fact, as I have been doing my creative exercises for #western106, it has inspired four posts over the last four days that I am really proud of. A simple prompt to get the creative juices flowing. In fact, that was the whole idea of the Daily Create for ds106: reinforce the power of the creative habit. That said, I personally come in an out of the Daily Create based on time and interest. My regular creative habit is blogging, but when I mix the two, I find the results much more compelling than usual. Fact is, ds106 has always been a performance enhancing drug for the bava, one that has continued to prove transformative for my practice.
So, for today’s Daily Create I got to thinking of patterns in the Western. And immediately my mind went to Western wallpaper. I was a child of the 70s, so there were still remnants of Western wallpaper while I was growing up. The Western was not only a popular movie genre in the 50s and 60s, it was a broader cultural phenomenon that informed wardrobes, furniture, and even wallpaper. In fact, Western wallpaper was common for a boy’s room, and I remember seeing it in so many of my friends rooms over the years. Here is piece of wallpaper I found on Etsy that is fairly typical of that era, and talk about a pattern!
What I love about patterned wallpaper like this is that it’s kind of like a movie. There is a sense of dynamism and movement, despite the fact that everything is static. I think what would be cool would be to create a retro wallpapered room with a pattern like this on LCD walls and build in subtle animated GIFs. Now there is a project for the next house I live in 🙂