All Your Broken Pieces (oil on canvas, 2022)

(Private Collection)

Artists who work in two dimensional media (painting, drawing, printmaking, etc.) have to contend with two different types of space in their work.

Decorative space refers to the two-dimensional arrangement of forms on the picture plane. These two-dimensional forms (primarily lines and shapes) can be arranged in such a way as to create balance or imbalance, movement or stability, order or chaos, and to establish a visual heirarchy.

Plastic space refers to the illusion of three-dimensions on the flat surface of the picture plane. When utilizing plastic space, the artist is always either creating the illusion of a solid, three-dimensional form or the illusion of empty, three-dimensional space. It's virtually impossible to have one without the other (although I have seen Mark Rothko paintings that just look like empty space). We create this illusion through the skillful use of visual form. Lines, shapes, values, and colors can be made to appear to be different distances from each other and from the viewer depending on how they are organized within the picture plane. For example, across the middle section of this painting, the cool, dark, blackish violets appear to be farhter away than the warmer red-oranges, giving the illusion of a dense thicket. The yellow, which is actually below, appears to be in front of this area of warm reds and cool violets, thus creating the illusion of empty space between the picture plane and the middle section of the canvas. Of course, all of this is smoke and mirrors; the painting is flat.

When I am working on a painting like this, I am always keenly aware of how the plastic space is developing. I usually begin with a vague sense of the kind of space that I am attemting to create and as the painting develops, I notice how different parts will advance or recede as I work. When I put a bit of color down it will cause other parts of the painting to appear closer or farther away and I am continually making adjustments until I acheive the spatial effects that I want. This can be quite difficult to learn how to do, but there is nothing mysterious or magical about it. It's mostly just physics. Anyone can learn how to do it, although it certainly requires a lot of practice. I am often asked how I know when a painting is finished. That is a complicated question that doesn't have a definitive answer but I will not stop working on a painting until I know that the sense of plastic space is unified.