Situate yourself at the beginning of something
This one was commissioned for a specific space, and I found I like working with these dimensions. While square canvases lend themselves to explorations involving radial symmetry, and the 3:4s and 4:5s shift more toward the bilateral, this golden mean 3:5 aspect ratio stretches things out enough that clusters can distinguish themselves in ways that escape simple symmetries, but without feeling pointless or arbitrary.
Avoiding the arbitrary, to whatever degree possible, is a priority for me. I’ve spent decades asking, “why this content, why this color, why this form, why this context, and not some other?” And if I don’t think I can get to a satisfying answer, I excise the element in question from my practice. Discovering how much can happen with so little, working under such rigorous constraints, is much more gratifying than the serendipity of tossing a bunch of random shit together and hoping to be pleasantly surprised, or of being overly dependent on a facility for creating likenesses.