In 2003, I began working on a series of paintings that use the vocabulary of sixties hard-edge painting, but explored a more contemporary, eccentric, broken colour sensibility– with dirty pinks, mauves, olives and lavenders. The work originated from some small, recycled paper collages that I made in Amsterdam in the summer of 2002, and then from some found wrapping paper (from Paper-Ya on Granville Island) – with a particular gridded pattern based on a four coloured squares that I then cropped and arranged in rectilinear grids parallel to the sides of the canvas. The four colours of these rectangular paintings typically met at a common point, that was usually determined formally with one or more measured square. The scale was purposely kept quite modest, allowing the viewer to perceive the painting as a complete whole, while focusing on the relationships between these different coloured areas.
After I made about twenty of these hard-edge paintings I felt I had exhausted these ideas, so in 2006, after remembering some early Ron Gorchov paintings with rounded corners, I made a group of lozenge shaped paintings on canvas and burlap that were mounted on a slightly concave, gridded wooden armature support.
