Series: Thin Lines

The process of making the undulating lines independent continued by their growing thinner. In addition, I no longer wanted the paintings to be concerned with the processual theme. It was meant to become their inherent, inexplicit component.
On a white canvas, using a thin brush and the free-hand technique, I painted colour waves in a geometrical system consisting of three directions angled so that they formed an equilateral triangle, whereby none of the directions was perpendicular to nor parallel with the edge of the painting. The areas between lines were subsequently filled with white and the undulating lines were corrected to render them smoother and as thin as possible. White was applied several times to completely cover the colour edges of the lines. In some paintings I managed to narrow the lines down to mere tenths of a millimetre by this method. Their original thickness is revealed only at the points of their crossing. Elsewhere I carried out the line narrowing using a single white layer only allowing the colour edges to shine through. This was for two reasons. From experience I knew that if I apply thin lines to a white background only, the underpaint becomes a neutral spatial background and the lines float as wires in the empty space at the front. Additional negative definition of the lines by means of a painterly rendered surface returns the whole painting to two dimensions which I respect as being commensurate with the surface of the painting.

In the process of painting I recalled a visit to a smithy a long time ago. I was told that old smiths believed that if they take two pieces of iron of identical thickness and strike one into a thinner form, the thinner piece has greater strength. Later, they were proven right as it was seen that there were striking changes in the molecular structure of the thinner piece. Although I had no ambition to produce stronger paintings, I employed this method in an attempt to concentrate colour from the pictorial surface into thin lines in order to charge the paintings with concentration, strength and silence.