String Theories

The series of paintings String Theories begins with a simple premise: everything is connected, although the evidence is rarely conclusive.

These paintings occupy the uneasy territory between order and disorder, geometry and gesture, calculation and intuition. Blocks of color establish a kind of architectural framework—rectangles, fields, compartments, planes and boundaries—while loose, wandering lines move across the surface as if they have arrived from somewhere else entirely. Some seem deliberate. Others appear to have escaped. Together they create the visual equivalent of a theory that is constantly being revised while the experiment is still underway.

String Theories Sketch ©2026 Eric Hatheway

The “strings” are both literal and metaphorical. They suggest connections, trajectories, diagrams, neural pathways, electrical circuits, constellations, mathematical propositions and the invisible relationships between things that otherwise appear unrelated. They cross boundaries without asking permission. They pass behind and in front of forms, disappear, reappear, double back and occasionally become hopelessly entangled. A string can connect two points, but it can also create an entirely new problem between them.

The paintings deliberately borrow from the visual language of modernism without behaving particularly well within its rules. Hard-edged geometric forms recall Constructivism, De Stijl and the rational architecture of the Bauhaus, while the gestural marks and organic forms introduce the looseness of Abstract Expressionism and the surreal logic of automatic drawing. There is something diagrammatic about the compositions, but the diagrams refuse to explain themselves.

String Theories v1 ©2026 Eric Hatheway

And that may be the point. A diagram normally promises clarity. String Theories offers the appearance of clarity while quietly sabotaging it.

The paintings are built from competing systems: measured and improvised, controlled and accidental, structural and expressive. The geometric elements establish a visual order; the strings question it. The organic forms interrupt the geometry; the geometry contains the interruption. Nothing quite settles into a single hierarchy. Instead, the eye moves from one relationship to another, following lines and colors as though trying to reconstruct a system whose original instructions have been misplaced.

String Theories v2 ©2026 Eric Hatheway

There is also a certain absurdity in the title. “String Theory” sounds authoritative enough to suggest that somewhere beneath all this visual chaos there must be a grand unified explanation. Perhaps there is. Perhaps the universe really is made of vibrating strings. Or perhaps these are simply lines drawn across a painting because they looked good there.

String Theories makes no commitment to resolving the question. It is less interested in proving a theory than in visualizing the condition of having one: the human tendency to connect dots, invent relationships, impose order, and then immediately discover another set of dots that ruins the whole thing.

String Theories v3 ©2026 Eric Hatheway

In that sense, each painting becomes its own small universe—part blueprint, part accident, part hypothesis. The strings are the evidence. The geometry is the argument. The tangled marks are the footnotes.

The theory remains unproven.