Edge No Edge
In 2021 I began making hard-edge paintings that started out as solid-colored concentric stripes drawn from very strong visual feelings about my time painting surfboards in the 1980s. The project evolved from solid analog surfer stripes into superimposed annular rings with color fades that combine to make coincidental light and spatial effects depending on the tonal choices and the sequence of hard-edge and no-edge transitions.
I experience suspension of disbelief while I look at these paintings where the concentric format fixes my gaze and my brain toggles between seeing different dominant light and spatial reads and then seeing just the sequences of gradual and abrupt color changes on the flat surface. These paintings are optical tripwires that make me aware of my brain scanning and rescanning what I’m looking at which makes me question what triggers my mercurial emotional response to reality.
Each ring is a single mark painted with a continuous brush stroke while the panels are spinning on a turntable. I hold wide flat brushes against a bridge spanning over the rotating canvas and blend colors squeezed from condiment bottles into super flat layers of paint with indiscernibly smooth color shifts. Each hard edge is produced with a hand taped stencil that covers up the previous layers so the color choices within each layer of rings are quarantined from each other until each stencil is peeled off and the underlying layers become apparent.
This process limits my preconception to the procedure within each layer as opposed to the product of the sum of the layers and within the concentric axiom it avoids pattern seeking that would taint my quest for the magic that makes things happen that I could not have envisioned. I feel my way through this process that yields visual stimulation that opens a door to connect vision and emotion.
