I’ve always been interested in paint’s ability to create illusions; it’s ultimately what it does. I like the way you say “mathematical”. I’m actually terrible at math and only passed high school because the principal was nice enough to ‘flip’ my final grade, so instead of a 46% I got 64%! He’d seen a drawing I’d done, pointed to the picture and said, “You obviously won’t be needing math much.” I digress, but that was probably the first and maybe most important lesson I learnt about the power of art.
I suppose this inner logic I follow is a sense of geometry. There is a lot of experimentation but also carefully calculated considerations. It really comes down to what appears near, what appears far, and the play between that distance. This applies to both figurative and representational or abstract imagery. It’s a push-pull way of thinking. I’m currently interested in shallow depth of field, kind of like that of a screen.
When I initially started painting with lines, I had the idea of tapestries and weaving in mind, and seeing the paintings through a screen brought forth the pixilation aspect of creating these lines across the figure. Recently, the idea of looking at paintings through phones came up, as it’s the way we view paintings at this moment. Every painting I make, I have my phone with me and I take pictures throughout the whole process, between decisions, and then make these decisions based on the image on my phone. I think every artist I know does this.
I ultimately want my painting to look good in real life and on a phone. In this sense, the development of the lenticularity in the paintings became very exciting to me as it added yet another dimension. There are multiple places for your eye to land and then shift back to the surface again. Or at least that’s the drive, to achieve that illusion. Magic!
“At the end of the day, it is all just paint. Whether it’s a figure, a rock, a flower or a stripe; it’s all the same matter. I think this is why painting is so magical.”