From Video Games to Minimalism

Saturday Night (Community Coffee with Chickory, 12 oz bag, front; Djarum Black Cigarettes, Box, front; Löwenbräu Beer, 12oz bottle, front label), 2004

People often ask “how did you figure that out?” when looking at one of my chromatic dissections. And that’s a legitimate question—there’s a certain feeling of magic that comes with my work that I’m not terribly eager to spoil. Suffice to say, it’s a blend of high- and low-tech methods to produce these works. Here’s the basic idea:

Given a road sign, a product label, a video game sprite, or almost anything else that has a limited color palette (My very first piece was a Steinway piano keyboard) I use a combination of high-resolution digital images and manual measurements to determine to a high degree of precision the proportions of each color in an image. I then create a new piece, usually with significant geometric simplicity, that bears those same proportions, creating an image that is at once recognizable and significantly abstracted.

Calculating these final proportions requires a bit of good old-fashioned Algebra (in a former life, I was a high school math teacher), sometimes to a pretty significant degree. My senior studio art professor was prepared to fail me for the year until she saw the pages of calculations that went into my capstone pieces—she reluctantly granted me a passing grade.

The pieces are in the tradition of color field painters of the middle 20th century, and the minimalists that followed. Originally, I created pieces in acrylic and watercolor, moving to enamel and vinyl for larger works and eventually to digital for the degree of precision it offered over hand techniques. These days. the vast majority of my work is digital, brought to life as museum-quality giclée prints, but I’m never above breaking out the watercolors again. There’s a certain romance to creating something highly precise entirely by hand.

More of my portfolio can be found at my personal website, and prints of many of those pieces are available for purchase.

If you’re interested in a chromatic dissection for a beloved product, classic video game, road sign, or other colorful piece of your life, get in touch. We’ll see what we can do! Otherwise, enjoy the prints offered here in our Fine Art section.

Sisters (Logos, clockwise from top: Shell, Diamond Shamrock, Exxon, BP, Chevron), 2003