Thanks for your thoughts. I find the notions of “mass and dynamic” and “anxious balance” very evocative. I think they’ll help me see things with a new eye.

Tony, some of your shapes appear to curve a bit at the edge of the canvas. Is this an illusion or do they really do so? The “curve” makes me think they extend beyond the canvas — or perhaps it’s the reverse — the extension gives me the illusion that the lines curve.

I was also fascinated with Marc-Relli, whose late work falls into the Pattern and Decor style. That “style” (or maybe it was a movement) uses edges in a very different way than Tony or Ellsworth Kelly. Those edges set up a rhythm, whereas Tony’s edges (forgive me for intruding on your work, Tony) feel to me like large drum bursts or a keening trumpet. For that matter, Birgit’s edges in the water are more rhythm, but they change time signature in irregular/regular ways.

Steve, there’s definitely a connection between the edge of a leaf within a painting and the edge of the canvas — a thorny connection that has been poked at often. The reason the Ab Exes (like Pollock) painted so large is they wanted to go beyond the peripheral vision, so there would be (at least if you were in the correct position in front of the painting) no edge within sight. All that you could see would be the color and shape the painter controlled.

This is wildly different from conventional photography (not yours, Steve) where the picture is totally elsewhere, outside the self. It’s probably why large-scale photographs are now all the rage — they are an attempt to force the viewer into the scene, confronting the edges within the canvas without the distance that the outside of the canvas would give one.

Tony, how big are your paintings?

Anyway, I’m not sure about the relation between the notion of edge as I had been thinking of it (edge of a shape, or even a line-like twig) and edge as the boundary of whole picture. It seems there may well be a connection in a fundamental sense, or maybe just as an association of ideas. Tony, were you explicitly relating those two notions, or is it just you were thinking more in terms of picture edge/boundary?

Regardless of how we got there, I do find tony’s investigations as shown on his blog (be sure not to miss the Older Posts link at the bottom) quite fascinating. It is definitely something I’m also thinking about in terms of cropping horse’s bodies, as in the image at top.

I tend to think of “allover” paintings as ones essentially ignoring the picture boundary (e.g. Pollock’s Lavendar Mist), as opposed to classic representation that composed within the boundary, or abstraction like Kelly’s that clearly referred to and used the boundary. Tony’s work seems to be pointing at the boundary by pointing beyond it with shape edges that run into the picture edge. Though abstract, it implies something cut off as in photographic cropping. I think this concern is very separable from Tony’s other main concern, the interaction of colors. Tony, do you see it that way? What is the relation for you among shapes, their edges, picture edges, and color? I guess that’s a pretty big question, but I’m interested in any thoughts you care to give us on the subject.

Could you explain that a little more?