Carnal Knowledge Print

Edna St. Vincent Millay proposes that for true beauty, simplicity is the most essential ingredient, saying in one of her sonnets “Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare.” Geometric shapes are not to be found in nature; they are a product of the human mind, simplifying, abstracting, perfecting the visual disorder of our lived-in environment. It is this extreme humanness of geometric shapes that I find compelling for it denotes the human impulse to go beyond what is given—to create. While Josef Albers and Piet Mondrian paid geometric homage to the square and right angles, my shape of choice is the circle, symbolizing perfection, our earth, moon and solar system, even the atoms comprising the universe. In creating compelling paintings with a restricted image vocabulary, rounded, enclosed shapes feel protective, nurturing and complete. My hard-edged, rigorously composed geometric abstract paintings offer clarity and a meditatively calm kind of beauty.