SHOW NOTES:

This is my second solo show since taking up painting six years ago, and I struggled a bit with the title: “r/evolve.” I love the sound of the word, but I worry that the forward slash between the “r” and the “e” is maybe a little pretentious? 

We’re going with it anyway - this is, after all, a show of round paintings, two that turn, a painted sphere and a few painted sculptures made of PA speakers mounted on turntables. All the work extends ideas and patterns I’ve done in previous work, but it’s nothing like what I’ve made before – it’s about evolving!

The biggest piece in the show is a seven-foot diameter disc made from a lacquered composite tabletop that my friend Joel found sitting next to a dumpster last summer. It was transported across town in a friend's truck with blankets and lasso straps (and the happy discovery that it could be rolled across my yard like a giant wheel of cheese); then it was sanded, primed, and varnished before a drop of paint went on it. I painted it over a few months in wedges, one pie slice at a time.

The real challenge was compositional. With most landscapes I follow a familiar rule-set: horizon about three-quarters up, diagonal lines receding to a vanishing point, bigger things closer, smaller things further, color vivid up front and soft in the distance. The rectangle is obedient. It holds still.

The circle resists those rules. Where is "closer" in a circle? Which way is up? Where’s the horizon? (Somehow it never occurred to me to just treat the circular edge as a viewfinder and paint an ordinary scene inside it. That would’ve been so much easier; also so much less interesting!) I worked from the center out, playing with radiating lines of perspective and curved, patterned wave shapes to suggest form, undulation, slope, elevation, distance. What came together felt like a little planet. Also a wheel of fortune. Also a mandala.

At a certain point it became obvious: it needed to turn.

I researched and acquired an industrial-grade lazy susan mechanism and called in a builder friend to help make and affix a mounting plate so it could hang on the wall. And once the whole thing was turning, everything opened up. I fell into my familiar dreamlike way of working, filling in spaces like putting together a jigsaw, leaving space for ground pink background to show through, creating telescoping points of view. I tossed little houses across the picture like Monopoly pieces, snaked roads among overlapping tree shapes and crop patterns, painted a sun on the curve of the horizon, then another, further down (or was it up?).

With the big one complete I set out on a series of what I thought of as “roundies,” using lighter wood panel, sheets of linen and projected spherical grids to expand on the possibilities. Along the way I found myself genuinely liberated by the circular. The cell, the eye, the planet, the ovum – we’re born of the circle/sphere. We live on one. We see through them. Our origin, our vision, our whole world is a circle/sphere. So what's with all the rectangles? Our windows, doors, screens, books, walls, street layouts — squares and grids everywhere! I felt myself getting downright evangelical looking around the ordinary world, wanting to scream: down with the Oppressive Right Angle! Sure rectangles are efficient, stackable, complementary. They give a pleasing sense of ORDER and CONTROL and USEFULNESS. Fine. 

But rectangles are not the only shape; they need to make room. Shout it loud, join the People’s Front Against Right Angles, celebrate the circular!