"One Thing Leads to Another" or "The Deception with Tact"

Semi Abstract Matta

This painting was started with some random stencils. When I renovated the floor in my studio there was a piece of glue that held the carpet to the concrete floor that was a real funky shape. Pretty much all the glue on the floor scraped up without a problem. It was all very brittle and broke into little pieces of trash except for this one piece.

This particular piece however, kept its shape as if it was just poured out of the tube of glue. I picked it up and saved it for a stencil in the future. What’s crazy in my mind, is that if you look at the picture of the stencil, which I have included, the top of it kind of curls around and creates this hook like square shape.

It’s a tiny thin piece of old glue and for all intents and purposes it should be brittle and should not have been lifted right off of the concrete. The top thin part should have broken off. What makes it so trippy for me is that had the tip of it broken off then the piece of glue would not have been very intriguing to my eyes. I would have discarded it, and this painting would never have been started.

So, if it wasn’t for the strength of some random carpet glue produced decades ago, the perfect temperature and humidity over the years in my basement, this painting would never have been painted.

Well, the future came, and I used it as a stencil, it's really that simple after that. Basically, the entire painting formed around that shape. I really struggled with this piece for several years. About 50% of it got done before it went into hibernation. I was really stuck on what to do and where to go with it until 2022.

There were a lot of things I really liked about it, the colors, the flow, and the abstractness. It was missing quite a bit in my mind though. So sometime in 2022 I was led to really sit down and finish this piece. Turned out to be one of my favorites and reminds me a lot of Roberto Mattas work.