From the artist:

Square Dots #1 is a pure abstract expressionist experiment. It was also soothing for me to paint because it involved painting dots and glazes, which I find meditative. I like creating rules for a painting and seeing what happens by following them. I started (after making and priming the canvas) with a line of magenta dots around the outside edge of the canvas. I followed this by painting a row of yellow dots inside the line of magenta, and then a line of blue. Once these had dried I painted a glaze (water-thinned paint that you can see through) of white over the whole thing. I repeated these steps until it wasn’t possible to paint another round of magenta, yellow and blue. I left out the glaze on the final round.

Finally, after the painting had been hung on the wall for a couple of weeks, I followed an urge to sand it. This resulted in the tops of the whited out dots becoming visible again. It reminds me of how it is to welcome back exiled parts of myself that were too scary to behold before. These parts bring with them joy and curiosity as well as their held memories of abuse.

During the final phase of painting, I was reading for a research proposal I was writing. The reading was about patriarchy and oppression and I kept needing to take breaks and paint. I painted tiny dots in sets of three and two.