My father used to like to make art with a ruler. He would mark off his large canvases in the studio with tapes and a steel yard stick and I can remember painting on the floor next to him while he meticulously filled in the delineated squares with acrylic paint. He’d let me use up the extra left in the porcelain palette and I’d smear and smack it on a canvas board into an infantile abstraction. I still don’t get using a ruler. I used the edge of a book (Huxley’s “From an Antique Land”) to push Patterson’s Lines out from the diagram. Still, there is something about Math and abstraction…. But I’d rather think about the whipped cream.
