A Lot of Good Reasons Not to be a Drone

Like a snowstorm and a firestorm mixed together, this painting brings together a lot of different kinds of mark making into a cohesive and balanced composition that feels as if it could fly apart at any moment.

This is one of the first paintings in this series to incorporate background drawing in pencil, in this case it is mostly overlapping circles. There is a circle pattern that you see a lot in modern art when you start looking for it, circles in a grid with an overlapping set of circles in a grid such that the places where the circles overlap form four eye-shaped petals in a cross shaped flower. It's a pattern that oscillates in your visual cortex when you look at it, you see one set of circles, then the other, then the petals. It's also very hard to do by hand. Later in the series I started using rulers and compasses, but this is all free-hand.

The paint also goes all the way to the edge here, which is something I've been playing with to varying degrees of success. I think it works here.