Aggregate #4

About the Item: 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 "hieroglyphs" 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.