El Lissitzky was born on November 23, 1890 in Pochinok district, Smolensk. In 1909 Lissitzky wandered through Europe making sketches, studies, and teaching himself the fine arts such as painting.(1.p8)

He created many types of artwork but what I was most drawn to was his Proun paintings. El Lissitzky invented the word Proun which he defined as the affirmation of a new art which would change the world. He attached this word to a number of his works which he felt embodied that idea. These paintings have an overall two-dimensionality to them. He utilized polygons that implied recession and protrusion from the picture plane simultaneously. He accomplished this by excluding vanishing points and therefore created isolated instances of three dimentionality while at the same time allowing for the painting to retain a truly flat state.(1.p33)

Another idea that was very relevant to El Lissitzky's work was that of isotropic space; a space in which no direction is more important than another: such as the sky. (1.p33) He used his mind to envision architectural structures that were not subject to gravity and floated in space. He intentionally created the feeling a varying perceptions by allowing seemingly flat shapes to flow into perspective space.

An important idea that El Lissitzky wrote about was how in many cases "the whole design process tends to emanate from the specific characteristics of the respective medium." (2.p29) This quote continually resonated through my mind as I worked on my Lissitzky inspired painting. At first my intentions were to create a painting that was in the style of El Lissitzky, but as i worked on my painting my intentions changed. I decided that it was important to allow my painting to develop in a more intuitive way as opposed to a direct emulation of Lissitzky's style.

I begane to appreciate the many varying qualities of the acrylic paint that I was using. Such a the tactile and textural qualities the arise from using thick fast drying acrylic paint. I allowed the seemingly randome shapes and colors to develop as a result of my engagment with the surface. This painting started off as an emulation of a style in conjunction with my own personal creative process and in doing so ended up producing its own unique identity. The painting was started in the tactile world and ended up in the digital world. The end result of my works produced a computer document with my painting at five different stages of development. From a piece of half painted wood, to a fully realized nontextured solid colored geometric structural image.

Works Cited
1. El Lissitzky, Manicipal Van Abbemuseum, Eindoven, 1990.
2. Russia: An Architecture for World Revolution. El Lissitzky. English translation copyright 1970.

Nathan Hayward