Why the cube? Part 1: How it started

The other day, I was chit-chatting with another artist/educator when they suddenly asked, “Why the cubes? Is it a style choice, or is it something deeper?”

That question is like Kryptonite to Superman for me.

It’s the one question I know I need to learn how to answer—but also the hardest one to communicate.

In my final year of undergrad, I was given an assignment to research an artist and write a 1,000-word paper discussing their themes and issues. While that paper has long been lost to a dropped hard drive or corrupted computer, I do remember that the artist I chose was Sol LeWitt.

What fascinated me about Sol LeWitt at the time was how he created these massive wall drawings—except he wasn’t the one actually creating them. He would meticulously plan the composition, choose the colours, even suggest measurements. But the core of the work was that others carried out his instructions. The drawings existed only for the duration of the exhibition and were then destroyed.

I found a quote in my sketchbook during my research: “Without the traditional support of canvas or paper, wall drawings exist as a set of instructions and can be installed again and again.”

As a budding artist, I thought this concept was wildly fun and inventive—odd, too—and it made me wonder: Is this really art? (That’s a question I’m still mulling over twelve years later.) Regardless, I was inspired.

By my final year, I felt an increasing push to “find my style” as an artist. But I’ve always been, and still am, someone who wants to try everything: portraiture, landscapes, abstracts, animals, acrylic, oil, watercolour, gouache, pen and ink, printmaking, ceramics—if it’s art, I’ll try it. So, as you can imagine, I was much the same in university. Not a single piece I made in those four years looked like it was done by the same person.

3rd year art

3rd year art

3rd year art

The one consistent thread, however, was my doodles. I was encouraged to translate those doodles into large-scale paintings. Most people today would recognize them as “zentangles,” but at the time, I would just fill page after page. When I tried to bring that smoothness of pen on paper into paint on canvas, I hated it. The paint was never thin or even enough, the canvas wasn’t gessoed or sanded to my liking, and I was always dissatisfied with the way the edges separated.

pen and ink doodle

pen and ink doodle

That frustration led me to experiment with tape. I invented my own process of doodling with tape, sealing the surface to create something smooth and mirror-like. The result was abstract works with some wonderful—and some terrible—colour combinations.

paint doodling with tape

paint doodling with tape

paint doodling with tape

At the same time, while I was learning about Sol LeWitt, I began simplifying my doodles. They shifted from curves and organic shapes into cube motifs. It was almost as if the act of using straight edges changed my meditative state while doodling during lectures and note-taking.

cube doodles, 2014

cube doodles #2, 2014

cube doodles #3, 2014

By the end of that semester, we were given a large-scale drawing assignment—at least three by four feet—where we had to develop a series of New Methods. These new methods had to consider questions like:

• Is the process potentially more important than the final outcome?
  
  
• Can these methods generate new processes or offshoots?
  
  
• How are these methods uniquely yours?
  
  

That assignment turned into one of my first cube paintings, drawn directly on the studio wall.

Sol LeWitt inspired the scale and impermanence of the wall drawings. My experiments with tape doodles inspired the cubes.

Final series of Artwork from Semester 2, 2014 including my New Methods wall painting

To spare you the terrible writing of my 22-year-old self, I won’t share my notes word for word. But here are a few excerpts to give you a sense of how much that project influenced me:

• “Went to the studio today to finish the New Methods project. This process made me realize that I want to take it further and go bigger. I loved this work… I think I found my thing!”
  
  
• “The idea of this work was to learn more from it than to simply create it.”
  
  
• “The process in itself was enlightening for me… I took enjoyment out of the piece, so much so that the work itself was worth more than the concept. That was important to me, considering the term I had and the changes my life is about to take—that just the work alone was worth the product.”
  
  

Little did I know that back in 2014, I had stumbled onto something that would carry me through another college diploma, a career in education, and into the work you see today. In the beginning, the cubes were both a meditative need to draw and an exploration of how artists before me approached similar ideas. Stay tuned to see how this practice has developed in the years since.