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Sunday, March 6, 2016

# 711 Reconstructed Painting 1974

I did quite a few variations on these. I still like them because of what isn't in them. I noticed in school that every painter leaves a little of their subconscious in their figurative work. This isn't a bad thing of course but it isn't intentional either. Every portrait has some of the artist's own face in it. I've seen very few portraits where this isn't true. I've seen very few paintings of any kind where it isn't true.

# 710 Reconstructed Painting 1974

The retinal paintings of Josef Albers had a huge attraction for me. I thought that they contained everything that a painting needed. The problem was that they were so formulaic. That didn't keep them from being wonderful but it did go against my ideas about intuition and art.

Saturday, March 5, 2016

# 709 Reconstructed Print no.2 1974

This is early piece from 1974. At the time I was looking at a lot of work by Piet Mondrian and Joseph Albers. I thought Mondrian was on to something but he became rather baroque in his approach. Albers' distillations were very attractive because I felt that less was more. This truth was an artistic problem for me for many years.

# 708 Reconstructed Painting 1974

Back in 1974 I made a painting very similar to this image. I think the color and composition here is very close to that painting. I remember being very excited that I was able to imagine a painting I wanted to make and being able to get very close to the idea. Minimalism was something I knew of but wasn't overly interested in. Yet I found that every painting I made was becoming more and more essentially minimal. I did understand that this was an eventual dead end but at the time I wasn't ready to give it up.