Mondrianesque Paintings
Mondrianesque is a series of paintings inspired by the modernist paintings of Piet Mondrian.
I have been responding to Mr. Mondrian’s influential work most of my life. It was when I was
living in the New York City area during the 1990’s that I began my first series of works influenced
by his late New York paintings where the Dutch artist spent the last years of his life and
painted his Broadway Boogie Woogie and Victory Boogie Woogie masterpieces. It seemed to
me that the former composition corresponded to the actual street design of the city itself,
and I decided to make my Broadway Boogie Woogie paintings do just that. Hence you will find
compositions that depict the street layouts around Times Square from the 1990’s decade and
a new series from the Spring of 2022 when I had a chance to visit Manhattan and witness the
changes, especially pedestrian right-of-ways, that have been changed in this part of the city.
Both series can be seen in my website’s New York City tab.
Jump to this past summer, when I had the opportunity to read a new book about Mondrian;
Mondrian: A to Z. In the book I learned how much Piet was influenced by music, how much he listened
to Jazz, and how he liked to dance, especially to boogie-woogie piano and especially with Lee Krasner.
Mondrian is justly famous for his geometric abstraction, and his pursuit of a spiritual dimension in
visual art, and he was also spontaneous. These are characteristics that he and I share in common. I
decided to make this new series that would explore the dynamic of rectilinear geometry and spontaneous
mark making that is influenced by the rhythms of jazz and other music, all the while pouring and brushing
acrylics around a framework of linear black or white caulk. I have studied that he labored and adjusted his
compositions over long periods of time while my approach is quick and alla prima, or all-at-once. All the new works were painted in my Alaska studio, and since I would like to show this kind of work in the Modernist inspired Palm Springs area, my plan is to make new works in this series here in my Joshua Tree studio.
