Edge No Edge

In 2021 I began making hard-edge paintings that started out as solid-colored concentric stripes drawn from my time painting surfboards in the 1980s. The project evolved from analog stripes into superimposed annular rings with continuous tone transitions that make light and space depending on the color choices and the sequence of hard-edge and no-edge transitions. I experience some suspension of disbelief when I look at these paintings, the concentric format fixes my gaze and my brain switches between seeing different light and spatial reads and then seeing just the sequences of gradual and abrupt color changes.

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 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.

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. This coincidental approach avoids pattern seeking that would taint my quest for the magic ones that make me see things I could not have envisioned.