New Painting Series: Scenes from the Land of Color
How can I talk about these paintings? Some of the pioneers of visual abstraction were inspired by the first abstract art form: music. For me these paintings are like little songs without words, compositions bounded by space rather than time. But they are also visions of a different world, where colors are brighter and more diverse than in the everyday world. The elements come out of the practice of painting, which is its own world, but there are shapes recognizably inspired by geometry and the natural and man-made worlds. Each shape of color is like a character in a story, set in a scene. So I am calling them Scenes from the Land of Color—please enjoy.
The new series is conceived to allow rapid development of many ideas in parallel. The small sizes—8"x10", 9"x12", 17"x17" diamond-shaped—make the paintings easier to manage for me, and more affordable for anyone. I have a pile of sketchbooks with thousands of mostly small line drawings, and the small formats let me translate more of these ideas into paintings while also integrating my previously developed painting strategies.
I will be producing larger canvases, but the series of small works has freed a flood of ideas, while also enabling me to paint a lot with more hope of being able to find homes for them, and not needing to buy a warehouse to store them all.