Early Renaissance painters such as Giotto and Duccio, and later artists such as Paul Gauguin have been among the most significant influences on my work. An artist I don't mention as often who also had a great impact on my thinking is the Dutch painter, Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), and specifically the abstract paintings he produced after 1920. These works, for which he coined the term neoplasticism, reduced the elements of painting to its essentials: a grid of vertical and horizontal black lines on a white background, and the three primary colors. Mondrian felt he had taken Cubism and abstraction to its logical end.
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| Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow 18" x 18", oil on canvas, 1930 Kunsthaus Zurich, Switzerland |
I was in high school when I went to New York City and saw his work in person for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art. Their classical simplicity and perfect balance, their minimalism, were extremely attractive and compelling. The idea of reducing color, shape, line - and figurative detail - to the minimum needed to express an idea has resonated with me ever since.
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| Composition No.II, with Red and Blue 15 7/8" x 12 5/8", oil on canvas, 1929 Museum of Modern Art, New York City |
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| Tableau 2 21 7/8" x 21 1/8", oil on canvas, 1922 Guggenheim Museum, New York City |
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