Hard-Edge

My desire to actually paint started while working on the digital designs for my 99 Transitions in 33 days.

Rather than making something digitally, I wanted to make something physically, something real, something that you can touch. I wanted to understand how to apply paint to a canvas and make sure that it sticks. I wanted to understand how colours work and interact with each other. And I wanted to explore the effect of deconstructing a composition. 

So I bought paint and canvasses and got going.

I chose the Hard-Edge painting technique that emerged in California in the 1950’s, as I like it very much, and created 3 series of 3 paintings.

Each series starts with a full composition, using my colour pallet inspired by the Paris Metro. The second painting is a deconstructed version and the third painting of each series uses just Red, Blue and Yellow, and the values of Black, Grey and White, the colour palette that the members of De Stijl became so famous for, to better understand its power.

The first series is based on a round-robin algorithm that increases the size of a colour block at every step (A-B-C, AA-BB-CC, AAA-BBB-,..). The second series is inspired by a Transition I made on the phases of the moon, but I used squares, as I don’t know how to do circles yet. The third series is based on guided randomness and the subsequent versions are inspired by Mondrian’s Boogie Woogie paintings.

The painting process is so very different from digital designing. Digitally, I would make 3 designs in a day, a single painting has taken me more than a week. Mistakes are permanent and you can’t hit “undo”, experiments are costly and take time, paints and canvases behave in different, unexpected ways,...but I love it. Very happy to have embarked on the journey into the world of painting.