Finding My Visual Language Without Realizing I Was Building One

The Same Shapes

Keep Coming Back

One of the first things I noticed was repetition.

Circles. Loops. Dots. Irregular rectangles. Heavy black outlines. Long vertical and horizontal lines. Compartments. Grids. Wavy bands. Small marks gathered into larger clusters.

They appear again and again.

In my sketchbooks, these shapes can be playful and organic. Circles grow into other circles. Forms connect like cells under a microscope. Lines wander through different areas of the page. Patterns fill spaces simply because I enjoy making them.

In my current painting, many of those same forms have become larger and more architectural.

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The rounded shapes are now blocks of turquoise and orange surrounded by black. Small geometric forms have become larger compartments. Lines that once wandered across a sketchbook page have become structural elements running through a large canvas.

I wasn't deliberately transferring drawings from my sketchbooks into my paintings.

The shapes simply followed me.

I Build Boundaries and Then Break Them

Another pattern became apparent.

I like creating boundaries.

I draw rectangles. I outline shapes. I divide surfaces. I create grids and borders. I place one visual area beside another.

And then I almost immediately begin disrupting those boundaries.

A line crosses through them.

Paint drips beyond an edge.

Collage intrudes into a painted area.

One shape overlaps another.

A carefully established structure becomes partially obscured.

Apparently, I like order—but only up to a point.

There is something about establishing structure and then interfering with it that keeps a surface alive for me.

Perhaps I need the boundary simply so that I have something to break.

Pattern Doesn't Have to Mean Decoration

I've also realized that pattern has become increasingly important in my work.

When we hear the word pattern, it is easy to think about wallpaper, textiles or repeated decorative motifs.

But pattern in abstract art can do much more.

It can establish rhythm.

It can slow down an area of a painting.

It can create contrast between complicated and simple passages.

It can move the eye across a composition.

And repetition doesn't have to be exact.

In my work, I rarely repeat precisely the same shape. Instead, I repeat families of shapes.

A circle becomes an oval. An oval becomes a loop. A loop becomes an irregular enclosed form. A rectangle changes proportion. A line bends.

The viewer recognizes the relationship without seeing an exact copy.

That irregularity is important to me.

I don't want pattern to become predictable.

Black Became Part of the Structure

Looking across these pieces also made me realize how important black has become.

I don't really use black simply as another color.

I use it to construct things.

In the drawings, black defines shapes.

In the collages, it interrupts old papers and photographs.

In the paintings, it separates areas, creates pathways and gives the brighter colors something to push against.

Sometimes black becomes an entire field and I scratch or paint back into it.

It is almost architectural.

If color is inhabiting the painting, black is frequently building the framework that contains it.

Burying and Revealing

This may be the connection I found most interesting.

I've always loved old papers, photographs, handwriting, typography, diagrams, advertisements and other fragments of printed material.

But when I put them into a collage, I rarely want them to remain completely visible.

I tear them.

Cut them apart.

Cover portions with paint.

Place something over them.

Scratch into them.

Allow only a word, face, number or fragment to remain.

The viewer knows there was once more information there.

That creates a little mystery.

In one collage, an old photograph is cut into narrow vertical strips. We can clearly recognize people, faces and clothing, but we can't experience the photograph in the way it was originally intended.

In another piece, sewing-pattern diagrams, typography and instructions remain visible, but they no longer function primarily as instructions.

They become shapes.

The same thing is happening in my current large painting.

Fragments of newspaper and advertising appear through layers of paint. Some can be read. Some cannot.

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They become evidence of something underneath.

I think of these surfaces almost as visual archaeology.

Something existed.

Something happened to it.

Something else was placed on top.

And parts of the earlier history survived.

Mechanical Against Organic

Another recurring contrast surprised me.

My work seems to move constantly between two different kinds of imagery.

There is the mechanical:

grids, rectangles, typography, diagrams, straight lines, compartments and architectural structures.

Then there is the organic:

loops, cells, flowers, drips, irregular curves, wandering lines and amorphous shapes.

My sketchbooks often lean toward the organic.

Some of my collage work leans toward the mechanical.

My current large painting contains both.

That may be one reason this particular painting has been so interesting—and occasionally so difficult—to resolve.

I'm not simply trying to balance colors and shapes.

I'm bringing together different parts of the way I make art.

Even the Colors Keep Returning

Then there is color.

Turquoise and blue.

Orange.

Ochre and mustard.

Black.

Cream and white.

And increasingly, flashes of pink or magenta.

Looking through these pieces together, I realized how often I return to essentially the same family of colors without consciously planning to do so.

Metallic gold adds something different. Unlike ordinary paint, it changes as the light changes. It can disappear from one angle and suddenly become prominent from another.

That unpredictability fits surprisingly well with everything else I am doing.

The Importance of Leaving Something Unresolved

Perhaps the most useful realization came when I started thinking about how to finish the large painting.

My first instinct—as it often is when a painting has been sitting in the studio—is to ask:

What else does it need?

Now I'm beginning to think that may be the wrong question.

Maybe the better question is:

What does it already have that I shouldn't destroy?

Looking at the sketchbooks and older work made me realize that many of the things I might have regarded as unrelated experiments in the large painting aren't unrelated at all.

The dots belong there.

The black outlines belong there.

The fragmented papers belong there.

The ornate patterns belong there.

The geometric shapes belong there.

The scratches, drips and imperfect edges belong there.

They have been appearing in my work for years.

The painting probably doesn't need another idea.

It needs me to recognize the ideas that are already there.

Discovering a Language After the Fact

Artists are often encouraged to develop a recognizable style.

I've never been particularly interested in forcing that.

There are too many materials I want to try, too many processes that interest me and too many directions worth exploring.

But perhaps a visual language is different from a style.

A style can describe what a finished piece looks like.

A visual language is deeper.

It is the collection of shapes, colors, marks, materials, rhythms and decisions that we instinctively return to.

And maybe we don't always choose that language consciously.

Sometimes we discover it by looking backward.

That's what happened to me with this painting.

I thought I was improvising.

Then I looked through my older work.

It turns out I had been practicing the vocabulary for years.