5 August 2025
In her Brooklyn Rail talk from 2021, Katherine Bradford says Robert Motherwell taught her that color and line were enough, but she also shows a Susan Rothenberg to talk about how the inclusion of a subject, (in Rothenberg's case a horse), augments those formal elements so they're in service of emotion. Have had these ideas top of mind while working on what is currently titled Pre-stake—a tree trunk with an incision or chunk chipped out represented as a kind of abstract red blog, its shape nodding to Holbein's Ambassadors (1533) and Kerry James Marshall's School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012). There's also a bird passing through and sky alluded to incompletely on either side of the trunk. Bradford also talked about making her way through paintings by accumulating formal decisions, and my recent process feels similar. Not an obscuring of the subject, but a way to use it as a container to ask painting questions. So Pre-stake seems an okay title—addressing the moment before something is asserted, set in stone, penetrated in a permanent way. The tree perhaps about to tip, the bird in transit, the forms solid enough to exist but sheer enough to dissolve at a particular vantage.