Here are the three sentences I wrote before starting Series Two. I'm sharing them not because they're profound, but because they're the minimal structure I need to begin without overthinking.
"Scale up. Let the canvas demand something. Work fast until the gesture is right, then slow down to refine."
"Color language: the full spectrum. No restriction. But ask which colors actually speak to each other instead of just placing them because you can."
"One question: what happens when scale changes the formal language? In Series One, the intimacy came from constraint. Can intimacy come from scale instead?"
That's it. That's the entire brief I gave myself.
Series One was born from restriction. I had colors I could use, a format I was exploring, a constraint that forced precision. It worked because the limitation kept me honest. But after eighteen months of that work, I understood the constraint well enough to understand what I wanted to move into. Which wasn't no constraints — that would be chaos. It was different constraints.
Scale is the lever. Series One had mostly stayed in a certain range — medium sized, intimate, invitation-level work. Series Two wants to be larger. Not monumental, but present. The kind of canvas that demands your full attention when you stand in front of it.
The color freedom is deliberate after Series One's warmth. In Series One, I removed variables to understand one thing deeply. In Series Two, I'm adding variables back, but carefully. The constraint is no longer "only warm tones." The constraint is "only colors that actually speak to each other." That sounds looser, but it's actually tighter. It requires more discernment, not less.
The third question — about whether scale can carry what constraint carried — that's the real experiment. In Series One, the paintings were powerful because they were contained, because every color mattered, because you couldn't hide in abundance. In Series Two, the canvas is larger. There's more room. Can I use that room without it becoming decorative? Can I make something that feels as necessary as the Series One work, but at a different scale?
I deliberately didn't plan more than that. Painters can get trapped in overplanning. You think through the whole series before you make anything, and then the actual work becomes execution of a plan instead of discovery. I wanted to start with three sentences and a blank canvas. The rest emerges through making.
The first painting in Series Two took two weeks. I made it fast, then spent the next week refining a gesture that I liked but wasn't sure about. By the end of week two, I understood the formal language I was working in. Not because I'd figured it out intellectually, but because my hands had figured it out. The painting told me what I needed to know.
That's the only way a series actually begins. Not with a master plan. With the first gesture and the question underneath it. With the willingness to let the work tell you what it wants to become.
Series Two is just starting. I'm three paintings in. The series has somewhere between eight and fifteen finished works in it, depending on when the question answers itself. I won't know until I make it. That's exactly how it should be.