Diary of the Grid: Gallery Item Close Up

See below for a close up of the 20 mm squares and 1/32" ChartPak tape.

Diary of the Grid — edited December 20, 2022

Painting 16mm colored squares in a grid is freedom.

Meticulously painting into the tiniest 90-degree corners, over and over again, multiplied by four, is freedom.

Last night, I had several minutes, and for several hours afterwards in my memory, the glorious experience of seeing (looking at) two simple colors juxtaposed. Yes, memory is in color.

The two colors were not absolutely random colors, one was predominantly blue, like the sky.

But both colors were very neutral compositions of at least three pigments each.

“I would happily look at this for two hours,” I thought to myself in language, as I watched the paint dry. It was not boring. 

The language was preceded by an acute coupling of visual pleasure. I would like to write that the other color was an orange, but it may have been a brown or violet brown tint.

But I had to move on.

Looking back on that now, I do not recall the precise two colors. I know about where to look for them on the painting surface. But I do not believe that I can find them right now, mid-center right.

There is a lot of this going on.

I look at grids and I ask myself, "Why is there no sentimental feeling in this?" Is it possible there are no feelings in a painting? Yes, of course.

But why no feeling in a very colorful grid? There is never a presence of no feeling.

I have moderately studied some more than 100 years of painting grids, from Piet Mondrian to Josef Albers and Richard Anuszkiewicz to Tadasuke Kuwayama, and so on, and I still have no sentimental narrative feelings, when I look at grids.

Why not, I ask? Or what feeling is geometry? Why does the grid exist? Something is there.

Perhaps the feeling to me is like looking at a Rothko painting, but a discrete quantized non-movement of abstraction, expressionism, photo realism, painting, and all the feelings are the same: painting, color, into small areas, perhaps canceling themselves out, and so on.

LED monitors and displays are also a discrete form of light. But there is a very much reduced number of wavelengths emitted from an LED monitor than reflections from a large canvas of natural pigments, with colors numbering in the trillions (my back-of-the-envelope calculation).

Pigments on a large canvas will distribute a more continuous multitudinous number of wavelengths into the room, an 'aura' I would label it (and not 'lasers' or 'beams').

Is all that beautiful to me? Yes, both all are beautiful to me. Do they give me narrative feelings? Not really, writing is to purportedly for that purpose.

Does a Freudian grid give one feelings? Is there such a thing?

Regardless of the debate concerning sentiment or narratives, the painting is dominated by something almost entirely visual in expression. And there seems to be potential in this form of expressing the grid.

Currently, i need to move more quickly, so that I can remove the tape, which may lose its ideal elasticity and adhesion properties over time (I do not know). Removing the tape will reveal the final violet black lines underneath (not shown).