Favor connection over achievement
Look at the earlier layers, the red ones. They feel earthy, ruts in smeared mud. Then there’s a sudden flip to the greengrey complement, with subsequent layers gradually warming toward the light yellow. Even though the value and acuity remain consistent, the hue transition from the red to the green is jarring. Dark rust, brick, softening toward a pale burgundy, those earlier layers set an expectation that the next layer will be a lighter, more neutral pink. A lot of my paintings have color shifts that progress along a rough gradient, making the form and the space feel of a piece (more about this in the next paragraph). But other paintings, like this one, involve an abrupt shift in hue, value, acuity, or some combination. The flip feels transgressive, even catastrophic. Like people talking over each other, the green to yellow progression competes with rather than extending what was happening up to that point. So everything from the green up is unmoored, the jarring color shift working with the dramatic symmetry related adjustments to convey the visual equivalent of someone hitting a gong too hard or dropping something made of glass. At some level, I must be ruminating about sudden disruptive, catastrophic transitions. 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.