Sonata in Three Colors

About the Item: This was from a series of work in which I was channeling some of the things I have always loved about Cy Twombly along with qualities of a painting I saw in a local collection by a Cuban painter that I really admired and have thought about a lot since. Of course both share a graffiti quality; Twombly was the first to work with a sort of automatic drawing, beginning in the 1950s, and what he did opened up this new language for countless painters. You still see traces of it in so much contemporary art. Antoni Tapies has been a big influence on me as well, and you can see some of him in this work as well. I limited the color palette in this one as a sort of exercise in discipline, since it is easy to let color get away from you in a painting like this one. There are areas of three-dimensional paint that help flatten the picture plane and restrict the eye from reading depth into the painting; they function in the same way as Barnett Newman's 'zips' and Susan Rothenberg's lines across some of her horse images. I used a wide variety of media in these to get the effects I want, including even automobile spray paint.