Textures Study

That dark slab sitting just left of center is the first thing most people notice. Painted in thick black strokes over a field of pink, yellow and blue, it looks almost like a mistake someone decided to keep, or a window cut into the surface. Whatever the reason, it anchors everything around it. Without that block of darkness, the rest of the canvas might feel like confetti scattered across a table.

The painting was made with a palette knife rather than a brush, which explains the flat, scraped look of the color patches and the ridges of paint standing up off the surface. Artists working this way lay down one layer, let bits of what is underneath peek through, then drag another layer across the top. The method goes back to the mid twentieth century abstract expressionists, who treated paint as a physical substance to be pushed around instead of a tool for picturing things. Works like this one, listed simply as a study of textures by an unnamed hand, are essentially experiments: an artist testing how colors behave when they sit side by side, and how thick paint catches light from the side of the room.