I acquired these three framed paintings that I wanted to paint over. I started my paintings but wasn't really satisfied with where they were going. They were portraits but just poorly done. One day my wife was disciplining our son for calling his sister trash. She flogged him with an old ruler that was lying around and the ruler eventually broke into several pieces. I looked at the old ruler in pieces and for some reason, they looked so beautiful just lying there. I painted over the portraits and used the pieces of the broken ruler to start the series which became "4 Strokes" derived from the amount of times my son was hit and each piece is a message for the 3 women in our lives. Keywords: text, type, dada, collage, conceptual, contemporary, modern