For Entasis, I printed variations of Alpha-Blox letterforms on museum board with Dikko Faust of Purgatory Pie Press in NYC, making configurations that suggest floor-plans, rugs, woven textiles and archeological sites. After printing, I used a combination of graphite, dressmakers chalk, soot, and gunpowder, alternately drawing, erasing and burnishing into the museum board, to bring the embossed layers forward, and to allude to sedimentary processes, the accretion of time and lived experience. Dressmaker’s chalk and lustrous graphite suggest generative processes of sewing, weaving and drawing, while soot and gunpowder imply destruction. Each drawing is unique and reveal some of the many possibilities buried in the embossed surface. Encountering this rectangle a myriad times brought me back to assisting with Sol Lewitt’s work at Watanabe Studio in Bushwick in the 1980s, to breathing charcoal at the NY Studio School in the 1990s, and it reinforced the love of patterning and craft that has motivated my work for decades.

The Greeks used entasis—a widening in the middle of temple columns— to counterbalance convexity the eye perceives—a kind of auto-correct and an acknowledgment of perception and disequilibrium. Entasis creates the illusion of stability, while being invisible. These prints bulge with a slight convexity from the pressure of the press. They are sculptural and reflect light as the viewer moves. Their ratio echoes a formula typical for the column count in a classical Greek temple. The ideal ratio was 6:13, the same as the number of circle Alpha-Blox forms in this series of drawings.