Recent work is grounded in two decades researching artist and educator, William H. Holst (1912-1995), prompting inquiry into “push/pull” and “fathoming” a surface. Holst studied with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown five summers beginning in 1949; was art department chair at Colby Sawyer College (1948-1977); and taught and painted in Maine for nearly a half century, including nine summers at Haystack. The William Holst Project launched williamholst.info in January of 2020. That project, a window into non-objective formal modernism, helped chart a course exploring Holst’s reductive process and reflecting on Jack Tworkov’s “cracks of light” (Cooper, “A Compound Eye”). Through observing, reducing, and simplifying, my objective is distilled tension and balance – a property in Holst’s work James H. Beck, reporting for ArtNews in 1962, termed “Logical Irrationality.” In the wake of a 2023 show, “Fathoming,” I have been probing the liminal space between stable and unstable figure and ground relationships. That tipping point resonates with ArtNews’ term and sounds like the math in the music to me. The work is based on figurative subjects and I have nicknamed it “figuring.” While my Holst project was the point of embarkation to non-objectivism, “figuring” considers the slipway to full abstraction.