T-Top Paintings

( 2006 – 2011 )

Like my Braille paintings, the T-Top Paintings are inspired by text.  The starting point here is the top of the “T” in the New York Timesmasthead logo.  As someone obsessed with how words look and mean, I love the way this shape’s sinuous asymmetricality can contain and specify color.  Each painting in this series features dozens to hundreds of “T-Tops” on uniform backgrounds that both push forward and sublimate the individual character of this typeset unit, so that the dominant ground colors of Tracing the Colors of the Sky and I Am a River Who Delights in Overflowing are subdivided and refracted into a sea of interrelated hues, while the layout and tonal progressions of Forest of Tells enforces a symmetrical, almost votive centrality.