3. INTERVALS
INTERVALS
Notes from 2024, revisited
Connected to the Alternate Sides Art Project
Excerpt: I arrange objects by the tension I feel in the space between them. I have been doing this my whole life without noticing — at a table, with furniture, with shells in the garden. This is the note where I caught myself doing it.
I. THE ORIGINAL ENTRY — APRIL 30, 2024
I arrange in ways where there is a certain amount of space between objects. I try to feel how much energetic tension exists within this space and to bring the object just up to the point of tension but not beyond that.
A consideration is, how does it affect the arrangement if the objects are fragments of a whole vs whole object within themselves. Does that change the nature of this energetic tension that exists within the space. Perhaps that is a rhythm or a vibration whose frequency is defined by the space between the pulses.
Secondly, another consideration is the number of iterations that can be generated given the objects. For each object added to the source collection, this introduces a new exponent for iterations. It is very much like calculating probability based off of variables.
When selecting which object to start with for a new iteration, I select with intuition. Where does the energy lead me. Is this based off the visuals or the actual presence of the mass, or a combination of both? Then each successive object is added in relation to the whole. It is like a road that is constantly unfolding one step at a time.
Within my project, the objects — wooden blocks with a painted image — are arranged with a play of making sense of images vs disassociating and making an arrangement based off of sensory information.
But what happens when the object is not an image. What if the object is an actual object that has its own material properties. Does one still arrange based off of visuals or energetic relations or both?
These are considerations for exploration and do not necessarily need to have answers immediately.
(Pictured here are sea shells that I have arranged in my garden.)
III. REVISITING THE NOTES
When I wrote these notes in 2024, I believed I was discovering something about arranging objects. Reading them now, I realize I was discovering something much deeper.
The arrangements were never the subject.
They were evidence of the way I naturally perceive relationships.
For most of my life I thought of arranging as something I did while making art. Looking back, I recognize it everywhere. I arrange objects on a table before I notice I am doing it. I move furniture until a room feels settled. I place shells in the garden, organize tools in the studio, and even structure essays by sensing when one idea belongs beside another. The medium changes, but the instinct remains remarkably consistent.
What I was calling energetic tension was my attempt to describe relationships before I had language for them.
I was never simply responding to distance. I was responding to how mass, scale, direction, material, and interval interacted to produce a feeling of balance. Distance was only one variable within a much larger system. What mattered was not how far apart two things were, but how they behaved in relation to one another.
That realization changed the way I understand my own work.
The spaces between the blocks are no longer empty gaps separating painted images. They are active intervals that influence rhythm, balance, and perception. The work does not exist solely within each painted panel but within the relationships that emerge between them. Every adjustment changes the experience of the whole.
I also understand now that arranging is not limited to composition.
It is a way of thinking.
Whether I am painting, writing, teaching, gardening, or organizing objects in my studio, I find myself searching for relationships that feel coherent. Harmony has never been merely an aesthetic preference. It is the point at which relationships settle into something that feels inevitable. I recognize that feeling physically before I can usually explain it intellectually.
The journal also reveals another discovery I had not yet made.
I repeatedly asked whether fragments behaved differently than whole objects, or whether an actual object should be arranged differently than an image of one. At the time, these felt like separate questions. Today I think they are variations of the same investigation.
A portrait fragment, a shell, a found object, or a painted surface all participate differently in perception, but they are guided by the same instinct. I am not arranging images one way and objects another. I am responding to relationships that exist regardless of whether an object carries representation, memory, or abstraction. Recognition changes how a viewer enters the work, but it does not change the underlying way the relationships are composed.
The experiments with magnets revealed something equally important.
Originally they were a practical solution for displaying the paintings. Instead, they exposed an assumption I had never questioned. Gravity had quietly been dictating many of my compositions. Once the blocks could exist independently on a magnetic surface, relationships rather than physical support became the primary organizing force. The paintings were no longer constrained by what could stand. They could now be composed entirely according to what felt visually and spatially necessary.
Looking back, I also recognize that these investigations extend beyond painting itself.
The same questions that guide the arrangements also guide the observational process that precedes them. I spend long periods studying how light reveals form, how materials respond to one another, and how subtle shifts in position transform the experience of a subject. Arrangement is simply another stage of that same inquiry. Observation continues through the construction of the work rather than ending once the painting begins.
Perhaps the most important realization, however, is that I was never trying to discover a method of composition.
I was gradually becoming aware of my own way of perceiving the world.
The arrangements are not the work.
They are the visible record of a lifelong instinct to understand relationships through making.