Gallery > Game Theory
As an unschooled convert to the abstract genre which I had long admired from afar, I turned, in 2010, to a favourite little nugget of our material culture, the classic board game - chess, backgammon, pachisi and their ancestors from lost times and far places. The 'given' of the game board grid (an abstraction in its own right) offered an entry point, and helped me along my way to confidence and a growing repertoire. Through it, I learned how to construct an abstract painting.
'It's arguable that, before we even made art - forty millennia ago when we were hunter-gatherers - we played games. A field of lines scratched on the floor of the cave, some pebbles, an idle uncle, and our own wit, and we have the beginnings of a long tradition. Any complete team of archeologists will have an expert on games, who can look at a pretty artifact, with its counters and unusual dice lying beside it in a tomb hoard, decipher the play, and fit this long lost cousin into a genealogy of the games of history'
(from an artist's statement, 2014)
Some of these you could actually pull off the wall and play on; others are fantasias and interpretations. But all are homage.