Kurt Stubbins

Architecture is the foundation for all of my pursuits. As an office boy working at my grandfather's firm, Hugh Stubbins and Associates — designers of New York's Citicorp Center and Boston's Federal Reserve Building — I watched buildings discussed, drawn and built with prismatic clarity. The impression it left was strong and lasting.

I have always imagined that life has an underlying structure like that of a skein or weaving hanging just above us. Structural but imperfect, the weave is loose at its edges and sometimes we chance to reach it. Grabbing a thread down, we use it to weave parts of our own fate with our own hands — even while the whole quality of the skein itself remains mysterious.

My work begins with structure — specifically the grid. The architecture of the grid allows hidden relationships to surface during the act of painting. These clues reveal the nature of the skein itself, if partially. Rather than something sacrosanct, the grid is itinerant and changeable: here falling apart, there asserting itself, as the painting accumulates marks, colours and textures, eroding visual certainty.