Neil Clements

In 1954, Myron Stout began work on a series of thirteen paintings that were to occupy him for the remainder of his career. He worked on these canvases over a long period of time, making a great many alterations to the silhouettes of the forms he depicted. One work begun in 1955, Demeter, was only deemed to be complete in 1968. At the time of his passing, Stout considered several of the largest of these paintings to be unfinished, a distinction that was perhaps clearer to him than anyone else. This uncompromising approach has led to him acquiring cult status, but it has also significantly lessened his visibility to a wider audience.

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The decision to forestall a canvas’s completion is to retain it within the private realm of the artist and their studio, and to resist the unseen ends to which artworks are put when they are released into the world. It is almost as if Stout saw his paintings as capable of storing up the critical appraisal to which he subjected them, and that this formed an energy that would protect them in their later lives.

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As a digital graphic format, the vector is a symbol of clarity. Unlike its counterpart, the raster, the vector is infinitely scalable. Vectors travel without degradation, which makes them ideal candidates for the transfer of information. A vector file generated in Adobe Illustrator can be just as easily ported to an inkjet printer as it can to a CNC-cutting machine. A form constructed from a series of mathematically generated curves can be altered an infinite number of times. A clean, hard edge is always maintained.