Some ten years ago I began painting monochrome fields with
the intention of confirming the phenomenal reality of the object
and diminishing what I perceived to be arbitrary in conventional
pictorial composition. The process of reduction led me to specu-
late that the most radical painting would eradicate expression.
To this end, I looked toward instrumental language. Graphs,
diagrams and video images seemed the appropriate model, in
that they are not generally expressive in and of themselves but
create an order in which representation takes place. Because
the underlying structure of this model is the Cartesian grid, I
began employing it as the structure which would determine all
manipulations of the painting, reiterating its two dimensional sur-
face and limiting the effect of the virtuoso performance. The resul-
ting paintings did not eliminate self-expression as I had speculated,
but reinforced the idiosyncratic contingencies of subjectivity. The
grid remains the predetermined starting point in the present pain-
tings. It is repeated in layers, one plane upon another, insistently
accumulating.