The mark adds the lifeblood to your art which sets it apart from anyone else's. Your personal mark or gesture is literally as unique as your signature. Whatever we do in the course of making work begins as a mark on a surface. Marks are the building blocks of any work of art, the language of unspoken words, achieved through a wide variety of methods and materials. 

The next in this evolving series of mark-making lectures, we explore the tension between structure and spontaneity in contemporary abstraction. This lecture traces how artists have used the grid as both a stabilizing framework and a surface to resist, disrupt, or dissolve through intuitive mark-making, gestural energy, and layered processes. Through examples of contemporary photography, painting, printmaking, crafts, fiber, sculpture, installation and performance, we’ll consider how artists “map” emotion, memory, and the passage of time through the geometry of the grid — revealing the human hand within a structure often associated with order and control.

A brief overview of the historical significance of mark-making and line in various art movements from the expressive lines of the Abstract Expressionists to the meticulous marks of traditional Eastern calligraphy is included for context.