Seeing & Looking on the ninefold path

(For only my patrons). A look into my creative process. I've talked before about my distinction between seeing and looking in my painting: Seeing is when I get a notion or mental image of something I want to paint; then I start rendering it. Looking is when I only understand where I am going after I am well into rendering something I had seen previously. So I conceived the notion of a four inch canvas on which I would render test patterns in various colors, using compass and straightedge. Something a baby could look at while grooving in its visual system. When I painted one, I decided to paint another with the same pattern but the direction of gradient reversed. When I put the second one next to the first one, I saw a metapattern emerging; I realized that I could preserve the metapattern by creating various underpatterns with variations in form and color. When I had four, it seemed like a unit. Then I did one more, swapping purple gradient in for the blue. At that point, I could see I was on my way to nine.