Mel Strawn

Excerpt from Autobiography. A Life ‘Career” by Mel Strawn August 5, 1929- May 17, 2020.

At about that time I recalled a design assignment I had made a few years earlier at Antioch ­and how stunningly varied and sophisticated the students’ solutions had been. I decided to explore that design project concept myself. Simply put, it was to explore the compositional possibilities of four tile-like “background” shapes, each supporting a single graphic shape that bled to the edges of its background tile-shape. An initial exploration was via hand-made sets of these…each set of four units to be rendered in each of four colors and matched with its mirror opposite.

This gave a complete set of 96 distinct tiles (above). Don McLaughlin, a mathematician friend found himself intrigued with this (to him, I suspect, a form of set theory) and calculated, in response to my question: how many distinctly different compositions could be made using all 96 tiles? The result is stunning–a number of 179 digits long!

Paintings essentially limited to just such ‘4 shape’ elements for any one painting constituted my sole production for some 14 years. Two are shown here: