As painting practice, the Symmetry and Hues paintings are very simple—basically just geometrically composed, house-brushed “patches” of some particular red, orange, yellow, green, or blue acrylic paint-color on canvas.

And you can see the patches being composed, in the painting. First notice that there’s a “flat”—a single allover blue or red background. Then see just the whole array of all the largest size patches, which are also all the same paint-color. That array of the largest size patches was painted first, and is behind all the other arrays of one-size/one-color patches. There will usually be four to six arrays of one-size/one-color patches over the flat, with each succeeding array’s next-smaller-size patches potentially overlapping any color below. The flat plus four to six overlapping arrays means these paintings usually compose five to seven paint-colors.

Then—when you’ve seen all the arrays of patches separately—after you’ve seen each array as a distinct two-dimensional composition of patches within the implicitly centered frame—see all the arrays together at once, with their colored patches integrated in the third axis of overlapping planes—as the composition of the whole painting. (Visual fun, eh?)

In the jargon of abstract painting, these are called “color-field” paintings. I’ve been referring to the fields as arrays to emphasize that ultimately, each color field in these paintings is a separate composition of discrete (never touching) one-size/one-color patches within the frame. As painting practice, I’ve always called the Symmetry and Hues paintings the brushmarks paintings.

As a chance to make personal contact, however, both emotionally and intellectually, I feel and think of all my painting now as performing visually for interested viewers like a musician or singer performs for their listening audience. I want to make the viewing experience a pleasure that will attract and reward repeated viewing, both brief and extended. And when I’m expressing my hope to make personal contact through the brushmarks paintings, I call them little love songs.

I was born in 1947 and grew up in the 1960s. In 1965, my summer after high school, I travelled from Paris to Istanbul/Constantinople via Italy and Greece, then back to Paris, seeing the European art I’d been studying for four years as art history for art class. One bag, trains and hitching, across a safe, very inexpensive Old World that welcomed post-war American kids.

I really liked “doing art” in and outside of public and high school. I also did ok academically, because I did what I was firmly told to do at home, mostly memorize. But art was different.

For me, doing art in public school, and then in high school art class—as well as at home throughout for my own continuously changing visual interests—especially meant being rewarded with happy personal contact. I could make art out of my imagination and when I showed my pictures to others their response usually convinced me I really had conveyed some of my pleasure in both making and sharing my work.

I was born in Virginia in the Camp Lee station hospital. My dad was a career officer in the U.S. Army Air Forces (the USAF since 1947) who had survived the air war over Europe. But he died when I was five, and my Canadian mother returned home—hence I went to public and high school in a brand-new suburb of Toronto. My mother had been a supply officer in the Canadian forces early in the war, stationed in Toronto when the US Army air forces were training nearby with the Brits before the US entered the war.

In the fall of ‘65, I went to Boston University’s College of Business Administration. I knew pretty soon that my future needed serious reconsideration. So I joined up before spring in ‘66 and spent the next two years in the Seabees (the Navy’s Marine-supporting combat construction battalions—CBs) acquiring some military discipline—including in Vietnam, mostly as a security lookout, out in the country, in the dark, in silence. I decided to be a painter.

And, while my service experience was helping me figure that out, it also took me (serendipitously, to understate) to the new art world. After the confinement of basic in San Diego, I was stationed first in Rhode Island—with Boston and New York nearby for weekend liberty—and then in California, just a short bus ride north of the new, very contemporary-art-aware LACMA. The ‘60s were an eye-opening decade for modern painting. Think Warhol.

The painting that riveted me, however, was fully abstract painting. I saw Mondrian’s 1920s grids of irregularly sized rectangles, Pollock’s and Kline’s postwar/1950s body-language painting, Gene Davis’ 1960s taped fields of identical width vertical stripes, Noland’s Targets, Louis’ poured rivulet-stripes, and Poons’ dots. I saw body-language markmaking and geometric composition, and the gloriously optimistic paint-color work they could deliver.

In ‘68 I went back to Boston, where my wife of now 55 years was graduating from BU in ‘69, and started painting. We moved to Toronto not long after, and have stayed nearby. (And we could still see the contemporary abstract color painting that was being shown by Kasmin in London and Castelli and others in New York, live in the Toronto gallery of an outstanding collector of that work, David Mirvish—a David Smith out front to welcome you. My first Toronto studio, in 1969, was three doors down the street.)

I’ve been painting and studying painting continuously since, pursuing my own way to advance the now century-old fully abstract painting tradition. But I’ve had the (for me) inexpressibly fortunate chance to explore forward in isolated independence, and haven’t shown. Here’s some 21st century symmetry and hues for your viewing pleasure. Really hope you enjoy the show.