David Ambrose has been exploring elements found in or on architectural facades, interiors, or floor plans in his richly colored, intensely worked, paintings on hand-stitched lace or pierced paper for more than 15 years. Ambrose's painting approach references that of the Pattern and Decoration and Process Art schools and he cites Richard Pousette-Dart, Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana and Peter Young as kindred spirits. The artist's current watercolor on paper work involves a synthesis of two seemingly divergent elements of control and chance.

Ambrose begins each composition by piercing repeatedly with a pin tool through a thick sheet of paper, working from both sides of the paper, building and repeating patterns as he goes. Eventually, once the entire surface of the paper has been worked over with pinpricks and treated with hide glue, the artist applies washes of color to the surface. The patterns he meticulously builds up with the pin tools create a system of levees, dams, and Braille-like raised surfaces that affect the flow of the pigment in unpredictable ways. The hundreds or thousands of tiny openings in the paper work to repel or pool the watercolor pigment as it dries. The movement of the watercolor over the textured paper is by design highly unpredictable, diverging radically at times from the artist's original intention. Ambrose's next stage, then, is to paint hundreds of brilliantly colored, tiny designs, and marks over the surface to synthesize his original stage of rigid patterning with the singular randomness of the watercolor wash. What results from this is a work that is both arresting unpredictable and highly organized, as pleasing on both the micro and macro level as a fractal pattern or any complex organism in the nature world.