"Joy" was painted a few years before I moved to Harvard, MA. While living in
the city of Lowell, I wanted to experiment with a more "expressive" sort of
painting. I had just finished "The Intruder," and was feeling less drawn
toward the precision of lines drawn with rulers. "Joy," although a happy
design, is extremely complex from a technical standpoint. There are no
physically overlapping colors in the design. It may appear this is not the
case, but on very close observation, one will notice the stenciling process
used is specific to ALL areas of color (which are separate from one another).
I was interested in accomplishing several things when beginning the drawings
for "Joy." I wanted first to see if I could rapidly scribble a single line
AND to try at the same time to LOCATE the single-lined scribble in such a way
as to leave other areas free for future single-lined scribbles. Accomplishing
this first task required my getting a clear sense of where each (of the 9)
scribbles would BEGIN and where each would end. The beginning and ending
points were especially important, but the path from point A to point B was
NOT as important. If it was, it would by definition not be a scribble. I
guess you could call these "controlled" scribbles. To further insure there
would be BALANCE, I plotted all the beginning and ending points out on a
sheet of graph paper so that there were 18 points to connect with (what would
be) the 9 involved colors.

The second task was to very carefully DRAW a second line approximately one
inch away from the initial single-line scribble in as parallel a fashion as I
could so that I could "enclose" the first line with a second line. There
would then be an "area" of color. The ends of the scribble were each tapered
to a point to complete the enclosure. The drawing of the second line was done
for the 8 remaining scribbles. To avoid massive confusion of which color was
intended for which scribble, I used 9 different colored pencils to do the
scribbles and the drawn lines for each.

The third step was to cut all the stencils for the 9 colors. There were
hundreds of stencils. 9 envelopes were used to keep them safe and separated.
Yellow was the first (and easiest) color to paint since it was continuous. I
was interested in seeing if yellow would appear to "float" over a darker
network of colors.

The other colors were painted in a similar fashion with stencils. The darker
the color, the more complex the subdivisions became. In the end, there
appeared a series of "ribbons" all of which seemed to mingle nicely together.
It was Joy-like. And so, I called this "Joy."