My working name for this group is administrative paintings.

These paintings present a sort-of Valhalla where The Grid goes to myth, where enlightened wanderers and true crosses distort, break up or get lost, and ideal forests appear chopped down to re-reveal an underlying (often distorted) System. I use pencil, mineral-spirit acrylic and oil paint, mostly oil paint. Paint is a mucky code to push ideas through, a counter to my administrative plans.

I draw a sequence of pencil-drawn canted squares that become cubes across, and then up, a primed canvas, following set rules. The cube edges become boundaries to which later-drawn cubes must accommodate. The cubes become distorted. Rule sequences often get chopped midway, stopped by the real edge of the picture plane. The hard rules may be dutifully enacted or downgraded to loose notions. There’s room to fail, cheat…

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…and go too far; the rules can morph along with the painting. Influences: the evolvable score to Stockhausen’s Stimmung, Fluxus’ instructions, LeWitt’s pencils, Adorno’s notion of bad infinities and C. D. Friedrich’s symbolic landscapes among others…

I put secondary scenarios into action to accommodate, deny and/or assign “literary” meaning to the cubes. They mimic thrown die or edges of tacked canvases or (to me) broken ice floes. Planks, tree trunks, wanderer’s legs, color flags and/or smoke may appear along margins, objectifying, corrupting or overwhelming the cubeforms. These non-cube devices populate via their own separate patterns and sequences. Though you can’t see it through the jumble, a sort-of moire effect is occurring.

The primed canvas is sometimes exposed between the cubeforms, bearing scars from the drawing and erasure that went into the initial pencil sketching. Primer plays a similar role as the raw cardboard and plain cast urethane in my sculpture, the body of the thing, seen. I might whitewash the gaps or fill them as a symbolic re-presentation of the ground. Lately the background is being asserted as a cheap imitation of a Romantic sky (see other paintings).

Elements from this series of paintings end up in my other recent work, and vice versa.