Perhaps some people are indifferent to stripes. I’m not one of them. They announce themselves and I inevitably react. It’s a dynamic I’m seduced by every time. Long stripes, bent stripes, implied stripes, fashionable stripes, rogue stripes, architectonic stripes. They work in me in a primal way. The photos above, all shot while on a recent trip to Norway, evidence the pull they still exert many decades after I first adopted them as my foothold in the space of pattern. They are essential forms whose capacity to signal (to communicate, graphically) and to order (to scaffold, compositionally) provided me with a conceptual rationale with which I could build a singular and signature body of work. [Note: the notion of “rogue” stripes is explored by Michel Pastoureau in The Devil’s Cloth: A History of Stripes & Striped Fabric, Columbia University Press, 2001.]

That body of work would be the Rhythm/Color series, the first of which was commissioned in 1985 by the Newark Art Museum for its collection. Then Decorative Arts department curator Ulysses Grant Dietz secured funding on the museum’s behalf through the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, I completed a preliminary maquette at his invitation, and ultimately received the go-ahead to proceed with the actual work.

Above, the maquette for Rhythm/Color: Spanish Dance, 1985, gouache on paper, collaged

Above, R/C: Spanish Dance in progress in my Somerset, MA studio, 1985. The maquette is propped up on the worktable, directing the choice of shapes I’d cut from the varied strip-pieced cotton & silk panels at hand.

If the surfaces of the Rhythm/Color quilts challenge a quick read, that was intentional. Like one’s own mind darting in fractions of seconds from one thought to another, from one perception to another, ideas being tossed and bounced like balls in a juggler’s hands, these figures connect and disconnect and reconnect in an insistent terpsichorean amalgamation. Tension follows from the disruption of the grid – both color disruption and linear disruption – and from the element of chance that plays continuously with the structural elements. I was working toward unity but using disunity to get there.

[Roy Behrens’ 2001 book False Colors: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage is a well-researched and thorough study of dazzle patterning and its uses in art and design, and in warfare. It helped me to see with greater clarity, in hindsight, the gestalt of my own work as well as that of other artists and designers, past and present.]

In 2015 the Newark Art Museum mounted a show titled Outside the Lines: Color Across the Collections that included Rhythm/Color: Spanish Dance and its maquette (seen to the left in the installation views). I hadn’t seen the piece since it left my studio three decades earlier. I was very gratified to reconnect with it in this space, in the company of a varied selection of works across media and across the museum's departments.