Studio 315

Multiples
Templates, ordering systems, and a future filled with change.

One theory of evolution explains the creation of new species as evolving from the physical structures available in earlier living forms. Thus evolved the legs and feet of amphibians from the fins of fish. Creation is not spontaneous generation but a cobbling together of genetic material found in the available building blocks in nature at the time.

The templates I use are like these genetic pieces. They become the compositional tools that allow me to find an aesthetic expression where change is inevitable and where order can coexist with continuous change. As I use the templates to draw they are themselves changed by the process.

From a stock of approximately a dozen template shapes that I created from a wide variety of visual and cultural sources (including my earlier paintings), I discovered new template shapes by combining parts of old ones and used these hybrids to make new compositions.

There are two bodies of work you see here in the BCA Office show. Both groups of work use just one template shape. The paintings on canvas are part of a series of multiples grouped together to make a new form. They are brightly colored and float on a light green background with little echoes of the template shape in the background. The works on paper are from a separate series entitled Origins. The focus is on how an elegance can emerge by layering multiple ordering systems—how one reads the flat surface— and how these layers can interact in dialogue with one another.

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