Blobhaus

Blobhaus started as a play on Bauhaus, but it became the name for the way I work.

I build a structure with geometry, patterns and rules, then bring an organic form into it and see what happens to the order.

Color, value and movement do a lot of the work. A bright color can pull you in, while a shift in value can make one shape press against another or seem to move forward.

Lines and forms carry your eye around the painting, sometimes smoothly and sometimes into a dead end. I use those relationships to build tension and keep the work from settling into one easy read.

The blob can contain the structure, cut through it or change how you see it. I keep returning to systems that look stable but aren’t, along with questions of vision, power, language and decline.

In the human icon paintings, the icon is the blob. There’s an irony in using a standardized, simplified figure to represent a complicated, organic human being. The geometry inside it still creates the tension. The outer shape has changed, but the relationship between the form and what it contains is still Blobhaus.

Those ideas are in the work, but I want the painting to hold your attention before you have to name them.