Scouting

This one started with two blue lines. That was it — two verticals dropped onto black card, and the whole piece came out of asking what happens when things run into them.

The blues stay put and everything else negotiates around them. Yellow bands sweep across in long curves and get interrupted; greens and reds mass up in blocks of zigzag against the edges of them. Then there are the double yellow lines that cut right through the lot, diagonal, ignoring what’s underneath. They’re the thing that makes it work, I think — without them it would be a set of shapes sitting next to each other rather than a composition with something running through it.

The colours are louder than I’d usually go for. Yellow, green, red and blue all at full strength on black, none of them backing down. Black card does that: it stops any of them looking washed out, so they end up arguing rather than blending. That’s most of the energy in it.

It belongs with the others in this series and works the same way. A very small starting point — two lines, a decision about what’s allowed to cross what — repeated and pushed until it produces something I couldn’t have sketched out in advance. You can’t read the finished thing back off the rule you began with. That gap is the whole reason I keep making them. And once it’s underway there’s still plenty to do, because the rule opens up a set of possibilities rather than handing you an answer; the choosing is mine, it’s just choosing inside a world I set up at the start and then have to live in.