The seventh series, Rent, was actually begun more than a year before the others. It differs from the later collections in that most of the early sketches were done digitally, using a sort of digital collage technique. The original principle was that accidents of the hand-drawn sketch might be simplified and reduced to a strict geometric approximation, with interesting formal and expressive results which in turn could be used as the basis for a new freehand composition. I was inspired to do this by an explanation by the British musician Kate Bush of a method she had devised for the creation of musical puzzles in a few of her recordings: she first sang and recorded a vocal passage; next, using the technology of the studio, she played the passage back to herself in reverse; she then learned to sound out the reversed syllables using the new inverse of her original melody, making an artificially modified complement of her original composition. The Rent 0.x images are all examples of early digital paintings which never actually existed in material form, but are entirely the product of digital manipulation; they became the foundation for the oil paintings Rent 1 through Rent 4.
