Emily Noyes Vanderpoel at home (www.sacredbonesrecords.com/collections/emily-noyes-vanderpoel)

Emily Noyes Vanderpoel (1842-1939) is a largely overlooked artist and writer. Her first book Color Problems, A Practical Manual for the Lay Student of Color was first published in 1901. It contained beautiful diagrams to describe the science of colour theory, and charted objects she deconstructed using colour analysis.

She deployed ‘the Grid’ long before it became a stage for formalism.  I am interested in her forgotten voice and her early use of the grid as a method of studying colour as visual language. The extent of her influence on early modernist aesthetics is unknown and the reprinting of her first book by The Circadian Press with Sacred Bones Books is an attempt to instate Vanderpoel as a visionary who influenced minimalism and formalism.

Vanderpoel used a grid of one hundred squares to analyse the colour of objects. Inspired by her method of charting colour and my interest in drawing in 8 bit I am interested in making some colour analyses in grids of 64 squares, 8 by 8..