STRIPE PAINTING : Observation and Realism in Abstract Art
Stripe painting is often treated as a minimal style, but it can also be understood as a form of realism: a way of registering structure, proportion, and light without pictorial resemblance. In this book, British abstract artist Harry MC sets out a research-led account of stripe painting as observation-based abstraction, drawing on architecture, visual perception, and traditions of pattern. Across six parts, the argument moves from the mechanics of seeing to the studio decisions that translate observation into measured bands and intervals. Stripes become a working language for contemporary painting — a tool for clarity, rhythm, and sustained attention — written from within practice, for readers interested in how abstraction can remain truthful to lived experience. What’s inside (bullets)
WHAT'S INSIDE?
Perception: why stripes remain visually “efficient” (edge, rhythm, temporal viewing)
Encoding: structure, complexity, stripe as interface (information theory)
Global pattern: stripe traditions across cultures (textiles and architecture)
Digital conditions: screens, grids, and reproduction.
Contemporary practice: continuation after modernism; studio method; viewing conditions.
Realism without depiction: essays on how abstraction preserves truth.
Paperback · A5 · 184 pages · Florence & Gertrude Editions · Bath, UK.
Published 2026. ISBN : 978-1-9195016-1-1
A short passage from Stripe Painting on what abstraction can preserve when resemblance is removed.
A painter stands before a Provençal facade. Warm ochre stone, rhythmic window divisions, shadow patterns marking architectural relief. The painter observes carefully: measuring proportions, registering colour temperatures, tracing how light reveals three-dimensional form through two-dimensional surface. Weeks later, in a northern studio, the painter translates this observation into vertical stripes on canvas. No attempt to depict the building. No perspective, no modelling, no recognizable forms. Just alternating bands, ochre beside cool grey, narrow beside wide, establishing rhythmic intervals that encode proportional relationships discovered through sustained looking.
The question arises immediately: can this reduction preserve truth?