All About Surface

In the late 1970's I worked with conceptual ideas and a minimalist non objective aesthetic, and for my own amusement and also that of my audience, I created art objects that were intended to be humerous, working with visual plays on words and language, or puns. The beginning of my journey towards landscape was a graffiti style representation of the outline of a hill. These images were perhaps more representational than I knew or intended - coastal Orange County where I grew up, Huntington Beach specifically, is flat with few features, and is often hazy so that distant landforms appeared only as flat hazy silhouettes. My outlined hill forms were in fact fairly accurate representations of both Saddleback Mountain, and Catalina Island, the only landforms that I was really familiar with in my daily life.

This painting from 1977 was intended to tell everything I could think of to say about surface, and took the form of both graffiti and a chalkboard. It is acrylic modeling paste on canvas painted with black chalkboard paint, with a window opening into a green chalkboard panel with definitions of surface and graffiti images drawn in colored chalk. Here you will find one of my earliest landscape images.

It is 48" x 48"