Spring #4 (View of Central Park from the 21st Floor)

oil on canvas

36" x 42"

The artists Sigmar Polke and Roy Lichtenstein used Benday dots in their paintings as employed by printers (Lichtenstein modeled his work specifically after comics). I'm not so interested in the regularity of that method as I like the quirkiness of my hand as well as the option to change scale. The location of the dots is important to the space in the work. Think Cezanne, Giacometti, and Mondrian mapping space. Their playfulness as compared to a mechanized look make them more Polka than Benday and also differ from the seriousness of the aforementioned artists. I also do not want to limit myself to very saturated colors (spaced differently to appear like more of a range) as is often the case with the Benday dots, preferring to mix more, which works better with the larger dots. Mondrian, while not a dot painter, reduced his palette to the primaries. He found the problem of working with red, yellow, blue, as well as black and white very complex, changing the size and placement of rectangles and squares in order to create a vision resulting from this interplay.

In Spring #4 dots expand on a white ground, showing the bursting energy of the city and the green treetops of Central Park.