Strange Distractor I

This painting and several others like it were made while I worked on my MFA and they hung for my thesis exhibition. It is to date the largest painting I have made, and it is executed in oils. I spent countless hours producing a very smooth gessoed surface, drew out the entire pattern in pencil, and then meticulously applied the paint in each cell, starting in the upper right corner and moving down each row and then over. Because there is only one layer of paint that was mixed with stand oil, the white subsurface causes the paint to glow luminously. I see this painting as being in dialogue with the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1980s while also making reference to computer chips and other highly detailed and complex technological objects and systems, as well as the glowing panels of buttons and signal lights found on navigational panels in science fiction space crafts.