Calculated Chaos

by The Paint Out Group

Beverly Elliot • Billie Bailey • Gaylene Brotherton •Jan Kurtz • Jennifer Fleming • Joan Overton • Karron Troil • Kathy Breazeale • Leslie Anderson • Linda Doss • Lorraine Flatt • Mary Anne Staples • Patricia O'Neal • Pat Page • Sally Tempel Miller • Tamara Fischbeck

“The Paint Out Group,” artists who have painted together monthly for over ten years, embraced the challenge of collaborating with wooden blocks. Compact and smooth, the blocks offered ideal surfaces for layering paint and collage. The central question was how to balance artistic individuality with cohesion. By vote, we limited our palette to mars yellow, nickel azo gold, blacks, whites, and metallics. This restraint unified the work while allowing subtle variation—creative chaos contained by calm.

Each artist created their assigned six-sided blocks using acrylic, ephemera, and hand-painted paper. Within the shared palette, themes emerged: life experiences, the female form, faces, abstract shapes, and occasional text. The idea of presenting the finished blocks in an abacus-like structure grew from group discussion after one member spied a child’s toy abacus. Another member built the wooden framework, inserting dowels that allow the blocks to slide and rotate freely. Selecting the initial front-facing arrangement became a spirited collective act.

Viewers join the collaboration by moving and spinning the blocks, continually reshaping the composition. With four decorated faces on each of thirty-five blocks, the possible configurations number roughly 1.18 sextillion—a number followed by twenty-one zeros.

Calculated Chaos reflects structure and spontaneity in balance: infinite variation held within a unified form.