The Orange Paintings

On September 8, 2001 I exhibited the first of the orange paintings at the Hall Space Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts. It was the weekend before... After that Tuesday I couldn’t continue working in that direction. While there were other projects completed, many building on my interest in genetics and evolution the orange paintings lay dormant, unrealized. Now a decade later I have returned to them. Inevitably shaped by the events of the past ten years these paintings embrace my desire to continue working. I ask that as you view these paintings you contemplate what you have lived through in the past ten years and meditate on how that time has shaped all of us.

Evolution, Genetics and Abstract Painting

Evolution explains the creation of new species as emerging from the physical structures available in earlier living forms. Thus evolved the legs and feet of amphibians from the fins of fish. Creation is not spontaneous generation but a cobbling together of genetic material found in the available building blocks in nature at the time. The templates I use are like genetic pieces. They become the compositional tools that allow me to find an aesthetic expression where change is inevitable and where order can coexist with continuous change. From approximately a dozen template shapes I discover new templates by combining parts of old ones and use these hybrids to make new compositions. The paintings and drawings here are part of the orange series begun in 2001 using a bright almost acid orange color reminiscent of the dyes used to stain specimen slides in biology. Brightly colored, these specimens float within a background pattern derived from the same template from which they are created. Flirting with the notion of creation these paintings present ornate decorative worlds from the simple origins of one repeated shape.