I'm getting close to the opening of Hidden Depth, my solo exhibition at Bryant Street Gallery in Palo Alto, and I've been spending a lot of time in the studio these past weeks, living with the work before it goes out into the world. There's always a strange, suspended quality to that period. The paintings are finished, but they haven't yet been seen. They're still entirely mine.
The show opens May 1st and runs through May 31st, 2019. The opening reception is Friday, May 3rd from 6 to 8 pm at 532 Bryant Street, Palo Alto, CA. I'd love to see you there.
What This Body of Work Is About
The title Hidden Depth came late, as titles often do, but it named something I'd been circling for a while. These are paintings that don't give everything up at once. They have surfaces that hold more than they initially show, layers underneath the final forms, decisions made and revised, evidence of process that stays present in the finished work.
I wanted to make paintings that reward sustained looking. That give something back to the viewer who stays.
Geometric Abstraction and What It Means to Me Right Now
Geometric abstraction gets misread sometimes as a cool, intellectual mode of painting, one that prioritizes system over feeling. In my experience, the opposite is true. The geometry is the container. What lives inside it is anything but cold.
When I work with geometric form, I'm not imposing order on chaos. I'm finding the order that was already there, in the way light falls across a horizon, in the way water moves, in the way a landscape resolves itself into planes and edges. The geometry is a way of seeing, not a way of avoiding.
That tension between structure and feeling, between the visible and the implied, is what this show is built around.
Constraint as a Way of Working
Something I've been thinking about a lot in the studio lately is the role of constraint. In geometric abstraction, the rules you set for yourself, a limited palette, a restricted vocabulary of forms, can feel like limitations. But I've come to understand them as the opposite. Constraint is what makes genuine choice possible. When everything is available, nothing is chosen. When you work within limits, every decision carries weight.
I've been writing about this more in Constraint and Geometric Abstract Painting, which gets into the specific ways I use limitation as a compositional and conceptual tool.
Presence and Stillness
There's a quality I'm reaching for in these paintings that I'd describe as presence. Not drama, not spectacle, but the kind of quiet authority that asks you to slow down. A painting that rewards patience rather than demanding immediate attention.
I think a lot about what it means to live with a painting, to have it in your home or your workspace, and how a piece that holds its ground quietly can become a kind of anchor in a busy day. That idea connects to something I've been exploring in The Quiet Luxury of Slowing Down, which is really about the same instinct expressed differently.
What I've Been Looking At
Richard Diebenkorn has been a constant presence in the studio this year, particularly his Ocean Park series and the notes he kept about his own practice. His insistence on working from something felt rather than merely constructed, on keeping the painting connected to observation even within abstraction, is something I keep returning to. The way he held structure and atmosphere in the same painting without letting either collapse into the other is a standard I'm working toward.
I've written about his influence in Richard Diebenkorn: Notes to Myself, and What They Mean to My Practice. His thinking has shaped a lot of what's in this show.
Come See the Work
Hidden Depth opens May 1st at Bryant Street Gallery, 532 Bryant Street, Palo Alto, CA. The opening reception is Friday, May 3rd from 6 to 8 pm. The show runs through May 31st.
If you're in the Bay Area, I hope you'll come. And if you can't make it in person, I'll be sharing work from the show here and on Instagram throughout the month.
