Aggregate #4 Painting

Here's a recent message from a buyer of a painting in this series, a seasoned collector: "Love your work. We collect colorists like Wolf Kahn and Jennifer Bartlett, whom I commissioned a piece from that is in the entrance of Mayo Clinic. We are old fans of Morris Louis and we see a Cy Twombly reminiscence in your work, but in a totally new original and fresh perspective in your work. We decided this morning that we would move/give away other work to add your to our collection if it is right for you. Thanks for sharing your talents. " Here's the Artist's Statement: "I began this series after being inspired by a passage of pastel in a painting that was very different from this, and playing around with altering the quality of the line by drawing more sharply or broadly, smearing, and mixing with water and acrylic. The colors are bright and tend towards the decorative, but the black and more acid colors keep these pictures from being too "pretty." There is also the roughness of the strokes to militate against the merely decorative. Some of the circular forms are fading, others are coming forward, depending both on color, lightness and sharpness of articulation. So there is a lot of push-pull tension here. You can't make this kind of painting without somehow referencing Cy Twombly, either directly or through his influence on others. But there's also Ida Kohlmeyer, the most famous modernist painter from New Orleans. I find her "heiroglyphs" a little too tight and contrived for my taste, but she was great with color which brought verve to the random forms she worked with in her later and most popular paintings." (On prior series by the artist): “These paintings are a refreshing departure from the current abstract art world’s seemingly endless parade of fields of color with scribbles providing form, a style that is easily mimicked and has become a sort of “safe,” accessible go-to. There are confident decisions in these paintings appearing as commitments of strongly delineated forms and unexpected collisions of color that give the work a visceral, confident and playful soul, increasingly missing from contemporary expressionist abstraction. They are the paintings of a real painter rather than a decorative artist.” ArtSeen, 2018