This painting represents my early musings on "grid-work" as a metaphor for the work of human hands.

It's inspired by 4 questions...

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1. Isn't it curious that so much of what humans develop takes the form of a grid... or combinations of geometric compartments? For instance, pixels form a grid-like network of lights which comprise the visual building material of all our digital experience. City planning is based in part on transportation lines forming cross-hatched patterns over land. Architecture, spreadsheets, panelling (canvases!), and land plots all use grids. The list expands, and I ask again... is this not curious?
2. How do the lines we make affect us?
3. How does our grid-making relate to the lines and forms we find in the natural world? Where are the overlaps? The contrasts?
4. What does it feel like to resist this grid-making paradigm? Should it be resisted?

Some of my wildly incomplete responses to these questions are represented here in this painting, and despite their simplicity, something raw has been captured in this scene.

The meandering flight patterns of a butterfly seem to operate outside of any value for effeiciency or geometry.

A lumbering net misses its target... and freedom for the would-be specimen is retained.

The cross-hatched pattern of the plastic paneling which filters the buzzing flouresent light in my painting studio is utterly unable to manipulate raw daylight when I hold it up to the sun. And so it should be.

And... nevertheless... I've come to believe our grids don't always restrict the beauty or flow we crave, but in some instances, become carriers of it. Sheet music lines, ranks of block in a cathedral wall, the pages of a novel, a soccer pitch, my friends' garden... these all employ gridwork to host the good stuff... even life itself.

For further reflections on grid-work, take a look at "Integrate", "Above the Grid", and "Tree of Life".

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