Every artist develops a signature technical approach—a way of translating conceptual intention into material form. For me, that's chromatic flattening.

It's not a technique I found in textbooks or learned from another artist. It emerged gradually through years of experimentation, through hundreds of failures, through paying obsessive attention to what happens when saturated acrylics interact.

How It Started

I spent years trying to create what I saw in my mind—geometric structure, saturated colors, visual depth, chromatic coalescence—without the result feeling flat or muddy or incoherent.

Oil painters have glazing, layering techniques developed over centuries. Watercolor artists have transparency and dilution. I work with acrylics on canvas, in a contemporary context where I'm trying to merge geometric precision with organic fluidity.

The breakthrough came when I stopped thinking of painting as something you do to a surface and started thinking of it as something you orchestrate—a conversation between intention and material properties.

The Foundation: Structural Mapping

The process begins before paint touches canvas. I map geometric divisions on self-primed canvas. These divisions aren't arbitrary. They serve multiple purposes:

• They provide structure—a framework holding the composition together.
• They create focal points and areas of visual rest.
• They suggest the concepts I'm exploring visually—in the refraction collection, for example, divisions represent the three phases of refraction (incident, point of incidence, refraction).

But—and this is crucial—these divisions aren't rigid. The boundaries between sections remain permeable. Colors will cross them, interact, suggest transition. The geometry provides structure without becoming dictatorial.

Step One: Pouring and Organic Coalescence

With structure mapped, I begin pouring. I work with metals, pastes, and acrylics. I pour fluid colors into the geometric areas, allowing them to interact at their own pace. This isn't random. I'm paying attention to which colors I'm pouring, in what order, how much fluid I'm using, and the angle of the canvas. But I'm not controlling the outcome precisely. I'm creating conditions and then allowing the materials to respond.

Step Two: Layering and Accumulation

As the first layer dries, I add another layer. And another. Each layer adds complexity. Colors interact with the layers beneath them. New color combinations emerge through translucency and overlap. With each layer, the work gains visual depth despite maintaining a flat picture plane. The eye perceives dimensionality not through traditional perspective, but through chromatic and spatial complexity.

Step Three: The Flattening Process

This is where the technique gets its name. As layers accumulate, I apply a process of compression. I'm not trying to create depth through perspective or illusion. I'm creating visual complexity while maintaining a unified, flat picture plane. The result is a painting that reads as unified despite containing tremendous visual complexity. The geometry holds it together. The chromatic relationships give it life. The compressed depth creates visual space without traditional perspective.

Why This Technique Matters

Many techniques can create beautiful paintings. What matters is whether the technique serves the conceptual intention.

Chromatic flattening serves my interests in several ways:

• It allows simultaneous expression of geometric precision and organic fluidity.
• It creates visual depth without traditional perspective.
• It allows saturated colors to maintain intensity while also merging and creating transitions.
• It creates traces of process visible in the finished work—the viewer can see the decisions, the layering, the thinking that created the piece.