I’m writing this as a way to help me understand what is really going on with the art I’m making.

What started out as a way to do something with materials that were taking up garage space, has now developed into a twisting road of questions and small advances.

I have been trying to work out what, if anything, is unique to painting on the surface of a cube. Until now, I’ve only applied paint to board or canvas but never to a 3-dimensional form.

The cubes were cut from a Douglas fir 2x4 at a lumber store in North Hollywood several years ago. Each cube was about 3.5 x. 3.5 x. 3.5 inches. I planned to paint one face and attach one or more to a board. In effect, it was a kind of low-relief sculpture. A sort of mini version of a Donald Judd piece. Projecting forward but fixed and therefore limiting what the viewer saw.

At first, I painted the cubes a single color on one face, thinking that I would attach them to a wall. I envisioned that each piece would consist of at least 3 cubes attached to a wall with a gap between each one. But I never came up with a good solution as to how that could be done. I know that it’s possible but my limited sculpture hanging skills ruled that out.

I made a couple pieces where I attached several to a board. I was going for a clean, minimalist effect. But when I stepped back, I just didn’t feel like it was anything special or interesting. So, the 36 or so blocks just sat in the garage for years.

So, after sitting untouched in the back of our garage for years, I decided to take them out for a spin. I gessoed the other faces of each of the 37 or so blocks and then painted each face a different color. I rejected the ones that had too many irregularities from the cuts made at the lumber store where I bought the 2X4 they came from. I wanted a more or less uninterrupted experience of each color butting against the next one.

But in my never ending struggle to make more space in the garage, I decided I had to do something with the remaining blocks. (One has to wonder about the relationship of decluttering to creativity.)I thought it might be a better approach to see what I could do with just one block at a time and forget about trying to combine several at once. That helped loosen up my thinking.

I gessoed all the faces of all the cubes and started painting the face of each one a different color. I tried to choose colors that played off each other without taking too much of a “leading role”.

I think there is something to the idea of how many colors are applied and in what way. If I paint each face a solid blue, it’s a blue cube. The experience of the cube’s form is pretty much the same as if it were painted white, The adjoining faces are experienced as continuous, each edge traveling into the next. The only difference would be the color but the overall impression would be of a cube consisting of equal faces.

Even dice, although they each have a different number of black dots on them are variations on a very similar black and white pattern. But since they are not exactly the same, the eye travels over it differently than if each face had the same number of dots.

Maybe what I’m making is akin to dice, then.

As I worked on painting each cube I started to think more about what it meant when a color met another color at an edge turning in space. Was there something intrinsically different about that meeting as opposed to it happening on a completely flat surface?

I think this is an an important question because at a certain point I feel I was simply painting colors in a considered and yet random way. I love using random chance but this was the wrong kind of random for me. I think random choice works when it results in happy surprises. I wasn’t getting any of those.

The choices of color both reinforces the form as well as obscures or distracts the viewer from the form. The result is a kind of nuanced camouflage.

A Wiki search revealed that the cube is one of the five Platonic solids. Plato associated the cube with Earth.It has 8 vertices, 12 edges and 6 faces.

It’s interesting to me that Josef Albers chose the square because it has no analog in the natural world. The fact that Plato associated the cube with the planet points to the cube’s innate organic parallels to the physical world.

I’m not sure how that changes my approach but it does help me to see the cube as a signifier of nature in some way.

More to be questioned.

As much as I would love to follow that piece of noir wisdom, I find it impossible to describe my art within a beginning, middle and end structure. That’s because my art process is circular, if not a lopsided spiral. So, my posts will take lots of side streets and detours along the way.

I guess that sounds kind of noirish, actually

So, my thoughts on my art and how it fits into the overall journey is definitely not a logical progression, like an evolutionary “March of Progress” chart.

The work that I am creating at the moment focussed on small wooden cubes painted with acrylic. I use paint straight from the tube, unmixed, no water added. This is something I picked up from reading about Josef Albers. I love the simplicity and directness of this approach. It forces me to work within limits. The idea of working within proscribed limits is one of the most important concepts for me in making art.

Several years ago, I had a local lumber yard cut up a 3.5” 2X4 into cubes. I painted the face of each one, thinking I would make them into wall art. I guess I lost interest or the idea didn’t appeal to me anymore, or probably couldn’t think of a practical way to attach the cubes to a wall. So they say there in a long row on a shelf in the small, crowded garage where I work.

In the time after that, I focussed on simple geometric acrylic paintings on masonite. Again, ideas I stole from Albers. But I just got tired of seeing those cubes, which weren’t painted in especially interesting colors. They were mostly earth tones because earth colors are the least expensive colors, acrylic or otherwise.

Since our garage is pretty cluttered as it is, I couldn’t stand having work I had started and neglected to add to the space congestion. So I took them outside to the beat up picnic bench in our backyard and started painting them with acrylics I had accumulated since the blocks were first cut. I used bright colors straight from the tube (once again, Albers) and tried to consider the effect of the color shift at the edges.

That alone was a kind of breakthrough moment. I started to see that the color interaction experiments in Albers’ work could be applied to a 3-dimensional surface. That was something I had never considered before. Obviously, others have done this but coming to this realization organically and on my own, gave me the impetus to push forward in this direction.

I have to say it was gratifying to find something new to learn from pieces of wood that had been sitting around for years in my workspace. This underscores something that is one of the most defining aspects of my process: I really don’t know where I’m going.

That said, it is important to always keep the antenna up and ready to move in a direction that is exciting and provokes my curiosity. The result of this way of approach is that I have lots of other projects that I have started, hit walls and then moved away from. This leads to me to the rather defeating idea that I can’t see things all the way through. That may be, however, I have started to see that there is no timetable for art.

It happens when it has to happen.

I feel this format will give those interested a more rounded idea of how I go about deciding what my art should be and how I develop it.

Below are my latest pieces in progress. They are wooden cubes influenced by the works of Josef Albers, Donald Judd and Sol Lewitt. More to be said and shared.

I graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Illustration. I freelanced for a number of years before becoming a story artist at Walt Disney Feature Animation. More to come about those experiences and how they influence the work I make now.

Here’s the link to my website.