Kinross #10
Michael Boyd
My principal passion as a painter has always been color and the
sense of light it can evoke. My paintings are abstract but the visual
experiences they present to the viewer may sometimes suggest impressions
of the visible world, natural or human-made. Since vision is perhaps our
strongest link to our surroundings, it is not surprising that even the most
abstract art will often remind us of something we have seen.
Kinross #10 is a painting from a series of related works of 1985-86.
The title is taken from the name of a town in Iowa, my home state. For
several years prior to painting Kinross #10 I had been using place names
both as titles for paintings and the source of compositional material. Put
simply, I used the letters of the title to locate points on a grid to initiate
a complicated multilayered compositional process somewhat similar to
subjecting a short musical motif to a series of transformations.
The Kinross series provided a temporary break from complexity:
In these paintings I worked more intuitively and with fewer elements,
of a somewhat larger scale, in simpler compositions. All of the paintings
in this series have irregular boundaries and simple color schemes in
which large areas of color contrast with linear structures are anchored
to the edges of the format.
Although strictly geometric in shape these color areas are more
brushy and atmospheric than hard-edged, and vary in appearance from
transparent to opaque.
I first experimented with irregularly-shaped canvases in the mid-1960s.
hoped that working within an odd or difficult format might have a tonic
effect on my sense of composition. It did, for I came to realize that the
irregular shape of the canvas could simply be thought of as the natural
boundary of the elements (shapes and lines) used in the composition.
This is the case with Kinross #10 and many other paintings of mine
with meandering boundaries.
I was thrilled when Rheta and Peter Auer purchased Kinross #10
in 1986 for their own collection. They lived with it for many years in a
beautiful setting and I am very happy that it has now found a new home,
and new viewers, at Ithaca College.
Michael Boyd, October 2002
Michael Boyd is a visual artist. More information on his work and
on the painting above can be found at
www.geocities.com/mboyd.
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