Blueprint Paintings

2010-24 / Multiple Venues

About this ongoing series

A blueprint is a plan for the future. Also, I sometimes think of paintings as a kind of data visualizations of my own lived experience — where life is the data. In the midst of the covid pandemic, I brought both modes together to reprise Blueprint Paintings, a largely monochromatic meditation on feelings of vertigo, control and lack-of-control in a world of accelerating complexity.

The paintings depict subjects like bitterroot flowers (Lewisia rediviva), nuclear weapons, chrysanthemums and covid graphs ('flatten the curve’) — all painted in muted-cerulean. In a different visual layer, I sometimes include brightly colored trompe l'oeil tape marks to invoke either a sense of motion or the idea of fixing things in place.