Why I Paint Geometric Shapes

At the last opening somebody asked me why a 'folk artist' paints so many hard edges. Fair question. Folk art is supposed to be loose, right? Hand-made looking. Mine is hand-made — I don't tape my lines, which any painter will spot in about two seconds — but it's true the shapes come first.

Here's the thing: when I remember the blocks I grew up on, I don't remember details. I remember shapes. The triangle of a roofline against a hot sky. The rectangle of a screen door with the light behind it. The city planning that boxed my neighborhood in was geometry too — freeways are just lines somebody drew through people's living rooms.

So the geometry isn't borrowed from some art movement. It's documentary. It's what's left when memory boils a place down to what mattered. My father taught color theory for forty years and he'd tell his students: the shape carries the memory, the color carries the feeling. I'm just doing my homework late.