The Geometry of Time

About the Exhibition

In Grace DeGennaro’s meditative paintings, time does not simply pass—it accumulates. Iconic geometric forms unfold across luminous color fields, interlaced with intricate lattices of meticulously painted beads. DeGennaro draws on ancient symbolic systems and mathematical patterns found in nature to create quiet sanctuaries for stillness and contemplation.

She discovered sacred—or philosophical—geometry after graduate school and has spent the past three decades studying Eastern and Western traditions to reveal a shared visual vocabulary. Mining the collective unconscious across cultures and millennia, she draws a throughline from Plato to Euclid, from Renaissance cathedrals to Hindu temples and Tibetan mandalas, in order to uncover deeper meaning embedded in geometric configurations. Her paintings probe elemental forms, searching for a distilled essence through a modernist prism.

In a studio converted from a barn in coastal Maine, DeGennaro works in silence, embracing a monastic process of accumulation and accretion. Her process is slow and serial: she may return to a single image for years, layering, shifting, and refining until a new form emerges. Working with oil and cold wax on linen, or watercolor on paper, DeGennaro occasionally preserves an abandoned hue—an artifact of the work’s evolution and invitation to slow down.

Water color studies explore the possibilities of shape and symmetry, while each painting is additive, carefully unfolding over months. Paintings begin with a transparent ground, then a central geometric form, and finally a lattice of hundreds of dots. Applied without stencils and guided by intuitive logic and natural algorithms like the Fibonacci sequence, these colored “beads,” as she calls them, alternate in measured cadence to generate optical vibration.

DeGennaro's deliberate and intuitive decisions invite sustained attention. What emerges from her process is not only a vibrant monument to pattern and symbol, but a sensory experience of rhythm, ritual, and reverence for time.

In Conversation with Friday Arts

Friday Arts

What do you want the audience to experience when encountering your work?

Grace DeGennaro

The passage of time has always been something, since I was very young, that I've attuned to. Sometimes people would say derisively, oh, that's just nostalgia, but it's not. I'm very aware of time, and I think we all should be more aware of time, and slowing down the viewer is something that I would like to do with my work.

How do you embark on making a piece?

I work in a serial process. The images unfold from each other, so I'm not starting from scratch every time I make a work. For example, the series that I'm working on now with the circle and the square, I will make 10 watercolor drawings to begin the series with just a circle in the center. Then I will juxtapose with that circle other geometric forms that I'm thinking about. That’s the way the series unfolds. And I learn a lot about the image and I learn a lot about what I want and don't want for the paintings.

Because my paintings are additive, I need to know a lot about what I'm doing and what I want the image to be before I begin. That's the reason why I make so many works on paper. In fact, during my painting process, I will start with drawings, go to a painting, come back to drawings to solve problems, and then back to the painting. So they're really the two processes, the watercolors and the paintings are feeding each other. I work in the studio as much on paper as I do on paintings.

You talked about this process of accretion earlier. Can you describe how that folds into your practice?

My works are geometric images that embody ideas of ritual, growth, and the passage of time. The process of accretion reflects an idea of growth. The accretion is a build-up. It takes a long time to make these works with these very small dots that accrete to make the form, the image. The idea of accretion is really a natural growth form. And so that's where things like the Fibonacci sequence and the idea of mnemonic growth, which come from sacred or philosophical geometry, come into my work.

Accretion not only reflects growth, but it really reflects the passage of time so that these marks that I'm making, these beads of color, suggest growth, and they also suggest the idea of ritual, which is where the bead image comes from, from prayer beads or rosary beads. That's also where the silence comes from, because when you're praying or holding a bead and moving through it, that's also a time when you're quiet and when you have sort of a reverence for time.

Do you recall your first explorations of these geometric forms?

It was in the early 90s. I had worked in publications as a layout and paste-up artist and I’d used stencils. I started making handmade stencils and I had two circles that I overlapped and I saw it made this perfect shape, sort of the leaf shape or almond or an eye shape. I really couldn't believe how this form was geometric but it had so many organic suggestions. I thought, "this is an incredible shape." I found it. I just kind of came upon it in the studio. When I researched it, I could see that it was an ancient shape called the vesica piscis that had been used in Islamic architecture. It was also a shape that the Virgin Mary might be presented in and it represented fertility.

Then I realized that geometry could carry all this meaning, all this symbolic meaning. That geometry was actually very sensual. I’d always thought of it as dry. But when I started doing research and I discovered sacred or philosophical geometry, I realized how it was so connected to nature and how it could be a language like hieroglyphics or something where each form carries symbolic meaning. That's when I began my research into different shapes that were used in different cultures in different periods of time and how they were all related but slightly different in their use.

Once I started researching sacred geometry, I started thinking about a lot of these shapes that were used across culture and time. That idea tied into my study of Carl Jung’s collective unconscious that I had done my thesis on in graduate school. The definition of sacred geometry or philosophical geometry is the unfolding of one image out of another. And that really spoke to me because that's the way I work in a serial process where I will just stay with an image,shifting it, overlapping it until I find another image. And then the next drawing or painting will start with the previous one and then move to something subtly different.

I was never good at math. In fact, I was not interested in it. But now I love geometry so much, it's just like another language, and I do feel like one of the things that I'm doing is presenting it in a slightly different way for people to appreciate it. I think sometimes if someone says that person is working with geometry or geometric abstraction, you might think of something very hard, hard-edged, masculine, cold maybe, but I feel like geometry is not any of those things.

How does working in watercolor fit into your practice?

I love working in watercolor. I'm not using watercolor at all in a traditional way. I'm using it transparently and opaquely at the same time in each of the drawings, so that the central image is always transparent, and then the beads are very opaque.

I particularly love working with watercolor on the black paper. The black paper is so dark and rich, and I think it suggests the night sky, and it also suggests blackboard to me, and I always like drawing on a blackboard. The high contrast between color and the black ground can be really beautiful. I can take ten sheets of paper, I can make a circle or three overlapping circles on ten pieces, put them up on the wall, and just put a different image on top of each piece. Then I can sit with those for months, and figure out which ones are the strongest image, which ones I want to take to the next step of making a painting. My flat file, which is at the center of my studio, is filled with hundreds and hundreds of works on paper. It’s a library for me to revisit and I look at the drawings a lot. It's really a vocabulary of marks and geometric images.

Can you speak more about the beads?

The beads are made with a very, very small brush. There's no drawing or stencil involved. It's a very intentional move. You need to be very focused. It's almost a meditative kind of process, which I love. It's a very intentional process. It marks time for me. It marks time for the viewer. I feel like all the time it takes to paint the beads can communicate the passage of time to a viewer. And hopefully the viewer will be able to sense it and to feel it and to maybe even be slowed down. I want the works to appear—for the viewer to feel as if the images have just appeared. I don't want the viewer to sense a struggle.

The color of the beads is different from painting to painting. In some, the beads are black and white, which is very optical. Alber's color theory comes in because I'm thinking about how colors react to each other, how one color being next to another color can cause movement or energy. I think a lot about complementary colors. And sometimes I'm going along and I change my mind and the color of the bead is not right and I'll shift to another color. And I'll often leave the color that I decide to abandon in the painting. I feel like that can give a lot of visual interest and it’s also just the narrative of the painting.

Watching you work, a word that comes to mind is precision. Some of your forms are rendered with stencil, but others, like the beads, are reliant on your hand. Can you talk about that tension?

Those central images with the stencils anchor the paintings, and then the hand-painted beads, they follow a geometric pattern, but since they're hand-painted, they're far from perfect. They definitely read as regular, but when you get close up to the work, it's clear that they're handmade. That tension is what I'm interested in.

I want the viewer to have one experience looking at the painting from a distance and a different experience looking at it close up. From far, it should have that sense of wholeness that I'm always looking for and it should read and be clear, but when you get close up, then you can see the beautiful transparency, the weave of the linen coming through, and then also the handmade quality of the brushwork in the beads.

How long does it take to make each piece?

Well, each painting takes a long time to make, but that's mostly because there's a lot of drying time between my three layers. Someone once said to me at an opening, “it looks like you have too much time on your hands.” [laughs] And I said . . . I didn't say anything. I just walked away. It's all about measuring time and presenting the idea of time through these beads of color. When a viewer is in front of one of my paintings, they need to spend time with the painting, and hopefully the time spent on a painting communicates to the viewer and slows the viewer down. There's this idea of slow art, like slow food. That's where I'm at, with slow art.

You’ve worked on series that can last several years or even a decade.

When I choose images to work with, they're really images that resonate for me. You know, it's not a casual kind of thing. I really want something that feels resonant for me, resonant throughout art history. And so usually when I choose a vocabulary of images to work with, it's something that holds my interest for a really long time. If it doesn't, I walk away from it.

Can you tell us about some of your ongoing series, for example Immutable, Rosette, and Lattice?

Immutable to me is never changing, but it's almost as if they're shapes that are always with us and will always be with us. That's the way the circle and the square are, because they're so ancient. And their relationship together is so ancient. It's used in ancient architecture. It's used in Tibetan mandalas. It's used in Islamic architecture. In Renaissance architecture. It's used everywhere. So for me that's what is immutable. What I'm trying to do is take those shapes and bring them into contemporary culture and make a new set of works that explores that relationship between the circle and the square.

Works in the Rosette series start with a central circle and then there's six circles overlapping that one, creating a geometric form of a rose. There's all sorts of opportunities for transparency to occur in the rosette. There's lots of shapes, including the vesica piscis, that are made by making the rosette. It's also a really ancient form.

On top of each set of overlapping circles is a geometric lattice. And of course, in this beautiful way you start finding geometric shapes inside the rosette and that's the thing about geometry is that it always surprises you. Dorothea Rockburne has a really beautiful quote to the effect of, “when you're working with geometry and art, if it doesn't surprise you, you're not doing it right.” Geometry is so great to work with because you really never know what's going to happen. It's a language that surprises you at every turn.

The original works in the Lattice series were three very large paintings with a lattice made out of cubes. That image came directly from a dream that I had right before the pandemic. The Lattice series started out as paintings and drawings that just used one single image and now it’s grown into paintings with different shaped lattices and lattices made with different shapes. It's a little more complicated and that's definitely an ongoing series.

Can you speak more about the cross-pollination of forms that you're inspired by that appear both in Eastern and Western art?

In the Immutable series that I'm working on currently, the two forms I’m using are the circle and the square. The relationship between the circle and the square has been used in art from Hindu architecture all the way through Tibetan mandalas. The circle originally would symbolize the cosmos and the square symbolized earth. It was used in architecture, drawing and painting. Right now, I'm thinking a lot about Tibetan mandalas, Hindu architecture, and Renaissance architecture. If you look at Renaissance architecture drawings, and if you look at the Hindu architecture and you look at the mandalas all together, it's all the same. They're all built out of the relationship between the circle and the square. I find that really amazing.

What does it mean to engage in a language that's not specifically from your cultural background?

When I first started studying non-Eastern bodies of work back in my 20s, I didn't think so much about that, but I just was really interested in them. Now I'm very sensitive to the fact that I'm a Western person and I'm not the best person to reflect on Eastern languages. And that's why I'm so drawn now to the circle in the square, because it's found in both Eastern and Western vocabularies. That said, the Indian Tantra drawings and their simplicity and their use as meditation objects is something that really influenced the direction that my work went in.

I think I'm using that vocabulary in a way that's digested and is my own at this point. I just think geometry is such a universal basic language. I mean, go all the way back to cave art and think about, you know, you've seen the pictures of beads, right, or like a little grid of circles, it seems to me as if it is very, very basic to human, to human thinking.

You've spoken about geometry in architecture across different cultures. Do you also look at geometry from the natural world?

There's two ideas of growth from sacred geometry that I really have used and thought about from the very beginning. One is called Fibonacci sequence. It's very simple, but yet plants actually use that in their growth patterns. For example, the thorns on the rose often grow in a Fibonacci sequence up through the plant. So that's very poetic, even though we're talking about numbers.

Another type of growth is called mnemonic growth, where things grow from the center out. So that's like counting the rings in a tree, the smallest one is in the center. And then each circle that reflects out in the ring of the trees reflects the circle before previous to it. Teeth grow like that, bones grow like that. And I've always loved that idea because it's almost a metaphor for the way we grow. It adds a type of poetry, metaphor, and symbolism into the work.

Explain the Fibonacci sequence for the math challenged.

The Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers that goes on infinitely. Basically you're just adding the two numbers. So it starts at zero, and then it goes to one, then one and zero are one and then one plus one is two, then three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four . . . It’s such a simple relationship. I think all the relationships that are found in nature are very sacred.

You've used the word "sacred" several times. What does sacred mean to you?

Sacred to me is not religious. Sacred is more like a reverence—a reverence for life, a reverence for time, a reverence for our environment, a reverence for the collective and a reverence for the way that everything on this planet relates. To have reverence for everything and everybody and for every moment of time.

Do you think about embracing and quantifying time on the canvas in terms of the journey of life and its finite nature?

I think that's probably at the root of why I do what I do now. I mean, it's not that I want to say, I was here, these are my paintings. It's really that I'm interested in being part of that continuum of people who make paintings with some kind of reverence for time and for the life that they had.

Yeah, and I think, let's face it, mortality, you know, it hangs over all of us. So you want to do something with your time that seems important to you. That's why raising kids is so incredible, because it is important. I'm just really drawn to that sense of images across time. It's kind of a heavy subject. I hope I'm doing a good job with it, that's all, you know, because it's hard to know. I really do want something more timeless and more universal.