Cinnabar Red … Cornered by Shapes belongs to the Exclamatory Intermezzo series, a body of small-format works that operate as expressive interludes within the studio. The painting continues the layered off-whites I first developed in an earlier set of intuitive paintings, and introduces two counter-tones, a saturated cinnabar red and a dark neutral grey, both carried by the geometric shapes that press into the composition and give the work its title.
The support is a hand-cut, woven paper construction. The main sheet is cut by hand at hundreds of points; dozens of separately hand-cut paper strips are then woven through the surface, interlacing with the ground to build a subtly variable off-white field beneath the painted geometry. That worked ground allows the shapes to sit against a shifting surface rather than a flat one, so that the geometric forms read as both cornering the red and being cornered by the paper beneath.
