Favor connection over achievement
Look through to the earlier layers, earthy, ruts in smeared red mud. Dark rust, brick, softening toward a pale burgundy, a more neutral pink. But then the color shifts to green, then to a light ochre. A lot of my paintings have color shifts that progress along a rough gradient, making the form and the space feel of a piece, but this one doesn’t. The progressions feel transgressive, like people talking over each other, like someone hitting a gong too hard or dropping something made of glass that bounces without breaking. At some level, I must be ruminating about sudden disruptive, catastrophic transitions. I wonder why.
Paintings like this one explore the distinction between local and atmospheric color, leaning heavily toward the local. When you see a yellow teapot, you make a determination based on a number of factors about whether it is actually yellow (local color), or whether it is a white teapot under an incandescent light (atmospheric color). In a literal sense, all the colors in a painting are local, but in a representational sense, even when it comes to nonreferential abstraction, the colors can read as local or as atmospheric, or both. Atmospheric color connects and integrates, conveying volume, luminosity, and the like. Local color distinguishes and isolates. Another polarity along another dimensional axis. More tools in the chest.