I Started Out in Search of Ordinary Things Painting

*This artwork will be temporarily marked 'not for sale' while it is showing at the Arnot Museum West Gallery in New York (through mid-August 2016). “ I Started Out in Search of Ordinary Things,” is from a series of artwork that focuses on the abstraction of recognizable patterns of expression, once commonly found in personally handwritten lists and correspondence, but now seen as vague memorials to an outmoded way of life. At the end of 2014, I went on a solo month-long journey to the little West Texas town of Marfa, with my seed of handwriting inspiration and a love of correspondence in hand. The stark, bare landscape and the influence of minimal art on the town made a big impression on me. Specifically, the concrete works by Donald Judd (room-sized open concrete boxes) changed the way I was looking at my own ideas. I imagined my letters as architectural structures that could be experienced at new levels of physicality and scale. The distant triangular paper structure contains very subtle mark-making; when viewed up close, repeated tally marks define the inner and outer walls. The artwork is acrylic on canvas with finished edges (dark blue), wired and ready to hang. If desired, the artwork could be framed but it’s not necessary.