Houston, We Have a Winner!
Acrylic on linen panel, 11.25x11x2.5”, 2019
About this work:
I spend a lot of time with my work, and as a result, I see each work as a marker in the history of my technical and/or conceptual development. This piece represents both. It was made on the first shaped panel I ever built, as part of an intensive study of woodworking I began in order create paintings on cradled panels that were well-crafted using the best materials, and which varied in height, width, and depth—the picture plane tilted out into the viewer’s space, operating in the middle-distance between painting and sculpture. Creating this work also led me to approach painting through a collaboration between intuition and chance—moving incrementally from objectivity to subjectivity, beginning with my process-oriented approach to the work based on the data I generated using my Eureka algorithm, to more of a “spirit of the law” interpretation of that data, and increasingly allowing more freedom of expression through the process creating this work, until I ultimately determined the final layers (the red and white areas) through intuition alone. Using colored strips of strips of artist tape, I tried out different compositions directly on the painting until I found this one, and in a characteristic confusion of two popular phrases, I exclaimed “Houston, we have a winner!”