Thoughts on Process

Thoughts on Process. When I was at Princeton, I took painting class as part of being an architecture student. I took painting classes when I was really young, and color theory, and all this. But I think any artist, you learn by doing. And I think if you have a strong enough vision, you figure out how to mix the paints in a way that suits what you want to do. Now, when I first started painting, two to three years ago, and the style, I was very obsessed with precision. And it took me a long time to get edges straight, and perfect edges, and perfect color fields, without showing the brush. 

I had to do that to kind of just master the paint. And then I slowly evolved away from that, where I started becoming more imperfect and showing rough edges. I am a geometric painter, I think that if I didn’t have any kind of boundaries, I just think my paintings would lack a certain force. When I was young, we grew up in a poor house and I was always wanting to repaint the house. I don’t know if that means anything, but it has nothing to do with painting. But I loved paint, paint brushes, painting. I loved the feeling of creating a new surface that you paint something over. So, I found something very gestural and kind of clean about the gesture of painting something.

This concept of inner energy is important to me. I always think of a painting as obvious and you understand it immediately. It’s kind of like a book or an article, it leaves you with sort of just a very kind of glimpse, or kind of an ephemeral experience. But I like to think my painting, especially as I’ve evolved, I’ve become very subtle, and you decode what’s going on visually in the painting. And this is not about ideas, it’s more about how you interpret color, and you begin to see things and understand things and have a different sense because the color’s so subtle. That’s what’s great about oil paints—that you can achieve a lot of subtlety.

–STELIOS author of The Oculus