On my journey through art school, I became extraordinarily interested in the powers of the most basic components of color and composition. How these components had an effect on human emotion was the focus of that interest. That certain colors could elicit certain emotions is already known and these hues are connected psychologically to emotion seems to have been solved. Certainly an all red work could impart either a sort of violence or a sort of love (this by itself could a subject all its own) but my question was more about putting these colors or knowledge in composition with other hues.

Does this create an emotional story? If so, could you tell a story by location and volume of colors in comparison with each other within the space of the canvas? If the composition stays the same but the color hues change is the narrative change? Or does it stay the same regardless?

With these questions in mind, I set about to build a system of composition to explore these questions. Early on, I thought best to remove as much as I could the ‘hand’ of the artist from the work. While I would be painting them, as well as exploring the effects of technique as well as the questions above, I wanted the process to be free of extraneous allegory. Thus non-figurative. 

While on my pursuit for this process, I had also been investigating more interesting methods of musical composition including atonalism, chromatic scales and serial composition processes. The latter of these lists was a fundamental contributor to the construction of the foreground-background development process used to create the sketches for these ‘serial’ compositions I have made. Perhaps not as strict as Webern would have been, I’ve stolen a number of the premises he used to create his own works and integrated them into my process of developing the subjects of the paintings that are used to explore those questions of form and color. 

For me, the part that I find most satisfying about the process is understanding how viewers interact with the pieces and compare their emotional experience with the sort of ‘story’ I had aimed to instill in each painting. These interactions I use to further hone the process.