Geometry and Picture Formats

I  appreciate that the use of square formats can remove the possibility of using  the more traditional  compositional elements to be found in painting such as, the "golden section" etc.   The centralization of the the square, for me, increases the control I have over the whole of the picture's surface;  a sense of static equilibrium is possible although  when I require the centralization of the focal point that too is attainable. This is not unusual and is successfully demonstrated by Gustave Klimt (1862-1918) in the landscapes he painted on the Attersee in Austria and also by Claude Monet (1840-1926) with his many paintings of waterlilies.

Borders, stripes, square grids and rectangles, often receding towards the centre of the work, breaking and interlocking, were often commonplace in the 1960's and 1970's, have started to re-appear  quite naturally but in slightly altered compositional layouts.

You could say that what I have done since 2010 is a kind of "re-birth of the cool", so important to me in the 1960's and now, not merely nostalgia, nor a shortage of ideas, but a conscious desire to move my work constructively forward with the addition of certain elements from the past. 

Stripes

The suites of paintings from 2012/13  Kind of Blue  and  Jade Visions,  marked the return of  complex striped compositional formats that had not been used  in major works since around 1968-1970.  In the case of "Kind of Blue" the whole of the composition is a series of vertical stripes with just the border and in  "Jade Visions" only the central section of the picture has been reserved for the striped motif.

               388  Blue Haze   (Kind of Blue 1 )                                        421  Anita's Blues   (Kind of Blue  7)                                                   391  Jade visions 3