The Oddly Compelling Pleasures of Obsessive Artwork
Certain artists pursue a specific niche with a near-fanatical precision and drive, producing extremely satisfying results.
Note: This article includes several video clips that are essential to the story, so I strongly urge you to read the web version of the article, not the emailed version. — Paul
It’s hard to express how much I love the amazing artwork shown above. The colors, the textures, the geometry, the symmetry — so good! Even better, it’s made from the simplest of everyday objects: toothpicks, paper clips, and Q-tips. Better still, those objects rhyme: picks, clips, and tips!
Here’s a short but informative time-lapse video showing how the artwork was made:
The artist who made this piece is named Adam Hillman. I just became aware of him (he was featured in an article I recently read), but he’s been creating similar works for a long time, most of which lean heavily on those same elements — color, texture, geometry, symmetry, and everyday objects. Here are some additional examples:
Lollipops
Toothpicks
Bendy Straws
Gummy Bears
Cereal
Colored Pencils
Pins
Obviously, Hillman gets a lot of milage out of food and small implements. But his range is wider than that. This next piece, made from phone charging cords, is basically all-white but is loaded with palpable texture:
Imagine how much obsessive precision it must have taken for Hillman to cut all those cords to just the right length and then get everything laid out just so. (I think we can safely say that he does not have a cat in his studio.) Similarly, it must have been a seriously painstaking task to burn all the matchsticks to the exact specifications needed for this next piece:
This next one might be my favorite. Think about how many pennies Hillman must have sorted through in order to find the right patinas for this color gradation:
The more I look at Hillman’s work, the more I think that the common theme isn’t actually geometry or colors or anything like that. Instead, I think the throughline here is the obsessive drive to organize things. When presented with a bunch of stuff, most of us just see, you know, a bunch of stuff. But Hillman sees a pattern waiting to happen. And once he envisions it, he feels the need to create it.
I don’t have Hillman’s visual talent (or patience), but I can relate to the organizing imperative. Think of some of the things I’m particularly enthusiastic about: uniforms, catalogs, style guides, collecting. All of those are about the satisfaction that comes from creating programmatic order out of chaos. I suspect many IC readers can relate to that as well.
You can see more of Hillman’s work on Facebook, on Instagram, and in this video:
Once I started looking at a lot of Hillman’s work, a bunch of other obsession-oriented artists started showing up in my Facebook feed. One who appears to be somewhat famous, although I wasn’t previously familiar with him, is a British painter named Noj Barker. He’s a bit of a specialist: He just paints dots. Like, lots and lots of dots: