Grid Artists

Piet Mondrian

The black lines are the flattest elements, with depth. The colored forms have the most brush strokes in one direction. Most interesting part is the white forms, which have been painted in some layers, using brush strokes in different directions. Mondrian's paintings of this period came to be increasingly dominated by white space. Mondrian left the Netherlands for Paris in 1912 where Cubism was already articulated. It would influenced him enormously, especially from Picasso's cubism art. 

When he starts to paint, he began to simplify and abstract the colors and shapes that he saw. The rise of Cubism also gave Mondrian a means to segment and reduce objects to their most basic forms.

Paul Klee

Paul Klee used a grid as an organizational format to explore movement, visual weight, and rhythm through the use of color and shape. He alternated hue, value, and intensity describing this contrast as heavy and light. Often Klee developed sequences of contrasting color squares. Vertical and horizontal columns could be organized by a numbering system awarding numerical values to heavy and light colors.

Chuck Close

To create his grid work copies of photos, Close puts a grid on the photo and on the canvas and copies cell by cell. Typically, each square within the grid is filled with roughly executed regions of color which give the cell a perceived 'average' hue which makes sense from a distance. His first tools for this included an airbrush, rags, razor blade, and an eraser mounted on a power drill.