W.C. Richardson's paintings are quick on the eye, slow on the mind. Pick a square. There is complexity, but also clarity. For all the curves and corners, the hues and curlicues, there is the intimation that the image is easily graspable, all at once. This is a promise whose pleasures are in the breaking. There is no one way in, no one way out. Spirals delineate the most obvious pathways for the eye; they also prove to be the most neatly thwarted. Color makes its diversions, overtly from relations in form, more covertly from the eye's overeager apprehension of color itself. Rhymes of shape and shape, line and line are always more subtle than was first assumed. In 5 to 6 to 5, any of the spirals can be picked up at the tip of its centermost coil--medium blue set against lighter, cooler periwinkle--and traced outward. Through cream-colored segments framed by a vibrantly variegated, underpainted line it runs, back into the blue, nicking or piercing a rubbery black, the colors shifting, the path nudged by stubborn spatters of paint, until it exits the side of the picture plane, only to take up the game again on its next orbit through. But to relentlessly track a spiral until it departs the solar system of the painting is to contrarily ignore not only color, at the expense of line, but also the titular geometry that color establishes. Like the others, this painting is laid out on an 11-by-11 grid, a format that suggests a number of glib central symmetries, none of which is exploited. The rhythms, though constructed from small, repeated units, are always several beats from simple. It's a fact of simple arithmetic that the spaces separating a series of objects number one less than the number of objects: five fingers, four spaces between them. 5 to 6 to 5 toys with our expectations by flipping back and forth between space and object, figure and ground, negative and positive. On the left, six light blocks are separated by five darker fingerlike projections; on the right, their numbers are reversed. And in the middle, somewhere between five and six, the exchange takes place. Scholars of musical perception disagree over the number of overlapping lines the brain can track at one time. Some say three, some four, some more. In any case, it's fewer than you'd think. However many analogous visual events we can followÑsay NÑRichardson offers N + 1, N + 2, N + 3... The object isn't to overwhelm but to entice, to keep us manipulating the terms we've been confronted with. This pictorial algebra aims at no solution. There's no point at which we can smugly attach a Q.E.D. to the last line and toss the pencil back into the drawer. These paintings aren't about finding the right answer, as in mathematics, and they aren't about producing the reproducible result, as in science. They're about the good answer, an experience that, though played out upon a configuration that is itself unchanging, is different every time. And the good answer isn't really an answer at all. It's a perceptual state, a frame of mind, marked not by resolution but by a welcome frustration. We assemble a mental image of the physical image before us, cobbling it together from layer upon layer of attempts at understanding it that never seem to go more than half the distance. There's one game here, played a dozen different ways. And though we come to relish the contest, we don't get much closer to winning it. Nor would we want to. In this case, practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes patient. - Glenn Dixon, March 2004 Glenn Dixon is a contributing writer for the Washington City Paper.