The distorted or questioned grid

Take any patterned material and it will have an underlying grid structure, however as soon as the material is folded, worn or simply thrown over something the pattern is forced into new fragmented forms. This can be a very interesting way to stimulate ideas. It helps create spaces, gives existing forms a new dynamism and opens out an artist's work to diverse other readings. 

Bridget Riley 1962

Usually associated with Bridget Riley and Op Art the distorted grid can also be used by figurative artists. 

Yun-Kyung Jeong’s studio

The artist Yun-Kyung Jeong’s work is densely layered, often using patterns to build larger forms, or using small images accumulated into repeating shapes. The grid is sometimes preserved as an underlying technical drawing and at other times broken, but you always feel that it is there somewhere holding together a type of image making that without this underlying structure could become too 'fay' or too 'fantastical'. Many of the patterns she uses—composed in black paint on unprimed canvas—resemble the stylised brushwork of East Asian ink-and-wash paintings. Patterns are built up using a range of close tonal values, often using sepia with ochre or blue accents, these images are much closer to drawing than painting, the fact that she works on unprimed canvas perhaps being part of this reading. She also includes geometric forms, both in small-scale building blocks, and in the larger patterns to which they contribute; parallel bands of a Z-like shape sometimes occur slanting from upper left to bottom right. 

Yun-Kyung Jeong also works on silk; and describes the marks she makes as being “like controlled exhalations filling a space.” She also plays with perspective and exploits empty space to create complex, vaguely architectural environments, and intimates biological processes and is able to use technical drawing systems such as axonometric projection to create convincing three-dimensional worlds of overlapping planes. Compare her use of axonometric space with Paul Noble's.

Paul Noble

Compare both Paul Noble's and Yun-Kyung Jeong's work to Garth Weiser’s paintings, all rely on grids to hold their work together. 

Like Jeong, I would argue that Weiser is as much a drawer as a painter, he sometimes begins by making a three dimensional model of an abstracted form as a ‘sketch’ or model from which to paint. (This is a really useful tactic; when stuck just make a model and draw from it, I often do this and it always helps) Coating his canvases with thick impasto grids or relief outlines of his composition, Weiser creates a textured foundation which enhances illusionary elements of scale and perspective and suggests architectural space. Using this blueprint of spatial order as a departure point for painterly invention, Weiser then disrupts the spaces arriving, sometimes following the dictates of the underlying pattern, and sometimes not. Incorporating flat geometric shapes, irregularly angled lines, and organic motifs, Weiser confuses reality and illusion, an inheritor of Bridget Riley's optical fascination with bent grids, he forces an optical confrontation between the picture plane and our expectations of mark made surface interaction and illusions created by grids. 

The press release promoting Garth Weiser's work is an interesting exercise in rhetoric, if you were thinking of some artist's blurb and wanted to practice writing a bit of 'arty bollocks' it wouldn't be a bad place to start. 

Find an axonometric graph paper generator here. Get some large sheets of tracing paper and work over an axonometric grid, whether working figuratively or using abstract forms, you will find that the graph paper helps you control the space in a particular way. Compare this to work done using a perspective graph paper.