In November 2023, as part of a residency I was doing at the Amazon Spheres, I was invited to give a talk on my work as part of Conflux, an internal conference of designers. They were particularly interested in the dramatic changes my work had undergone in recent years and what drove those changes. Good question, I thought. I would like to know that myself. I set about unpacking the plethora of experiments, dead-ends, crises, writings, and, of course, art, I’d accumulated in the past four years, and attempted to wrestle them into some sort of narrative arc. This post and the following one are adapted from that talk.

I used to paint little slices of narrative, warped mirrors of mid-century America. I painted on repurposed domestic fabrics and integrated the patterns of the fabrics into the images.

Before I was a painter, I had studied film in college, and I sometimes thought of my paintings as stills for films that were never made. I pulled apart the visual elements of print advertisements and put them back together again into stories that were less neatly resolved than the ads.

Over the course of thirty years I had developed a process to wrestle this material out of Madison Avenue and into worlds of my own creation.

I made large drawings of the people, houses, and objects that interested me, moved them around until I had a composition, and cropped it. I’d build panels the size and shape of the final compositions, then cover the panels with fabric.

The flatness of the fabric against the painted illusion of space were integral parts of the story.

I felt my characters were pinned inside the fabric, stuck in their times & places. I also felt, I was certain, that this process and this subject matter would keep me occupied and interested for the rest of my days.

But a few years ago I started to feel a little restless with the way I interacted with the fabric. It required so much planning and exactitude, which limited how I used the paint. I loved pattern, but I wasn’t sure if the patterned fabrics were really doing all they could, or if they were becoming merely obligatory. I suspected that I might be the one who was trapped inside the fabric.

I early 2020 I completed some commissioned paintings in this style and delivered them to their home in California. I came home, and shortly thereafter the world ended.

I was fortunate enough to be able to work alone in my studio during quarantine, so I went in every day to work.

It was hard to concentrate. Doing the same thing in a completely changed world, painting people when there were no people around, made almost no sense, but I persisted, starting new paintings on fabric, not sure where they were going, because that was what I did.

Things got a little weird, so I thought I’d take a detour and come back.

I had always loved printmaking for its ability to get me out of my head. Tackling the technical challenges of simplifying and reverse-engineering an image would reset my brain, and usually bring me back to painting clearer and a better painter.

Print studios were all closed at the time so I had to use what I had around. Which were a couple of screens, a squeegee, some ink, a roll of Tyvek, and an Xacto knife.

I conceptually tore apart this ham into its exploded view. I reduced & resolved it into shapes simple enough that I could cut them with a knife, separated them into the four colors of commercial printing, cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK), and put it back together again.

After a few of these prints, I would, naturally, go back to my “real” work.

Then the phone rang. A building manager I knew had an empty storefront (a lot of those around at that time) and he had heard something about programs for putting art in empty storefronts, and did I know anything about these programs.

On impulse I said, “Programs schmograms!” (or something to that effect), “I’ll put something in your storefront.”

I had committed myself to making an art installation, which I’d never done before, with absolutely no idea what I was going to do or how.

I went back to this impulse to tear everything apart and put it back together again. This time I was thinking about pattern: I’d been working with it for years, but had never allowed myself enough time to learn what it is and how it works.

Pattern is a shape plus a relationship. I chose squares, and the relationship of changing scale and tone according to some rules I made up.

At the time I was engaging with the world largely through screens, and I was totally sick of it. I wanted to break the screen images down into something I could touch.

I cut plywood into squares, and painted them red, green, & blue, to make physical manifestations of pixels. The squares got smaller and lighter as you got further back in space. It was textbook atmospheric perspective which I had used and taught for years as a painter.

I had to conceptualize and visualize the installation in three dimensions, and figure out how to construct it at scale. My studio looked like an alien had taken it over, but I actually thought of this piece as a painting.

Which OF COURSE I was going to go back to, painting being my “real” work.

But first, as long as we were still in this stupid pandemic, and no one was watching, I wanted to dig a little deeper into this “structure of pattern” business.

A unit + relationship. Its roots are in weaving, one of the earliest technologies.

I made a square unit.

I rotated this unit clockwise or anti-clockwise in rows. Change the starting position for the next row. Repeat.

A square unit, two possible directions, 4 possible starting places. Three variables, infinite combinations.

I soon realized that by drawing them individually, there was no earthly way I could make enough permutations to find out.

So I switched back to screenprinting, a simple technology I had on hand. I cut all 8 possible rows for each unit into a tyvek stencil and printed them a row at a time.

I approached this scientifically: What does it DO? And tried to forget about making capital-A Art.

The physicality of the process was essential, the repetition was soothing and really helped with the uncertainty of the times. I would get up every day knowing what I was going to do.

I was going to keep moving the squeegee and covering the walls with these patterns until I figured out the what and the how and the why of this.

I started layering the patterns, building up translucent layers of CMYK palette, just to see what they would do. At some point I started to have opinions about my experiments. Some worked better than others. That gave me an inkling what I wanted them to do: To start to move, to have a sense of space, and of things vibrating just under surface.

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At some point also it became clear that I wasn’t going back to my “real” work. I was doing my real work. Continued in part two…