This painting is made up of approximately 240 birch plywood panels each measuring either 5 7/8" or 11 3/4" squares. As I worked on the piece in my studio, I used strips of Velcro on the wall and panels to hang the individual pieces in order to be able to move them around as needed to compose the painting. It went through countless configurations over the course of the nine months it took to complete and was almost never the same at the end of a work session as it was when I started. This gave me flexibility to arrange the panels as I chose and allowed the painting to grow, change shape, and eventually turn the corner. The color palette developed in to softer, more muted tones as the work progressed but in most panels some of the original bright underpainting is still evident. The surface of some panels have been sanded and abraded to get back down to the intensely colored first passes. In the last three installations of the painting it has been a different configuration each time. I did not see the piece in it's entirety until it was actually hung despite painstaking pre-arranging and composing.
"Fly Over" development over the course of nine months.