By that time he had just made his big break as an artist, thanks to a flurry of gallery shows: at Todd Hosfelt in San Francisco, CRG and Mary Boone in New York, and William Griffin in Los Angeles, all within a two-year period. One breakthrough series, also a study in color, consisted of canvases made to look like commercial paint chips and actually covered in house paint, complete with names like “blue horizon” and “fragile blue dusk” (“poetry written by commerce,” he calls it).
But when he looked into the idea of doing a flip-digit piece, the European companies who had the technology seemed unwilling. Having more connections in Europe this time around, after showing his work there, helped.
He ultimately found a company outside of Bern, Switzerland, willing to manufacture the piece for him. And he found an animation expert in Long Beach to help him program the piece using a mix of off-the-shelf and proprietary software.
He spent months perfecting the 80 different colors in each spinning module (picture a mini-Rolodex with colored polycarbonate flaps instead of white paper cards) that makes up each cell on the grid. He also drew numerous storyboards — even quick images on the back of envelopes — to map out key sequences in the artwork.
