On Color

Art history has been a cornerstone of my practice since my earliest encounters with art. It remains central to how I grow as an artist, whether by sharing thoughts publicly or quietly returning to works that have stayed with me over time. I revisit paintings for inspiration, but also for companionship, for instruction, for the quiet joy they continue to offer.

Over the years, color has moved to the center of that exploration.

I no longer experience it as a secondary element of drawing or composition. I have come to see color as a medium in itself, something that records attention, duration, and atmosphere. Josef Albers described color as relational and unstable. Others have treated it as structure, emotion, surface. I often return to paintings asking a simple question: what if color is the primary subject?

Can color function as a record of time, of restraint, of ambition, of cultural shifts? Can it succeed independently of form? Can it signify something entirely different once released from representation?

This project begins there.

On Reduction

Its direction could expand infinitely, and I do not pretend to know all the paths it might take. For now, I am building a set of simple, deliberate rules that allow color to move through an abstract system. The system is minimal yet generative, constrained yet capable of surprise.

Each work begins with a palette. Some are drawn from paintings I have archived over years of looking and studying. Others come from museum collections that generously make their public domain works accessible. I also introduce my own studio palettes. The source varies, but the process remains consistent.

I do not extract the image. I extract its chromatic balance.

Dominant tones, supporting fields, and quiet accents are preserved as weighted intervals. What remains is not the painting itself, but its distribution of attention.

On Structure and Generation

Once extracted, these colors enter a structural grammar. Grids, bands, planes, radial systems. These are not stylistic gestures but compositional frameworks. Structure becomes a way of asking the same question repeatedly: what happens when the same colors are reorganized under different conditions?

The generative aspect is essential.

Technically, the image is sampled at the pixel level. Colors are clustered using k-means grouping, then merged perceptually until a target palette is reached. Each color is assigned a proportional weight based on its presence in the source. That weighted palette is then mapped into one of several structural cases. Randomness influences spatial distribution, sequencing, scale, and orientation, but it does not alter chromatic weight. The color proportions remain intact.

Every time Generate is pressed, the system recalculates the composition within these constraints. The palette is inherited; the structure is recomposed.

Every generated work is a translation, not a reproduction. The chromatic logic remains faithful; the geometry shifts. No two compositions are identical, yet they share a common lineage.

It is both a surrender and a study. A surrender to the beauty and instability of color, and a study of how it survives transformation through structure and variation.

I sense this exploration has only begun. There are infinite pathways ahead, each shaped by the same colors, endlessly reorganized. I am excited to follow them.