Untitled Paint Download
Samuel Gallishaw
"I am happy to announce that I just won this masterpiece," Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa said in an Instagram post revealing his identity as the buyer. "When I first encountered this painting, I was struck with so much excitement and gratitude for my love of art. I want to share that experience with as many people as possible."
In this portrayal of a stately painter who turns to face the viewer, Kerry James Marshall participates in a long art historical tradition of images about image making. The sustained, self-aware gaze of the painter demands that the audience engage actively with the work. On the hand that grasps the palette, the painter's thumbnail suggests her political stance: it is painted with the green, black and red of the Pan-African flag. Her own self portrait is a paint-by-numbers canvas, possibly implying that the reality of this painter upends our received and codified notions of gender, race, and identity.
In this painting, the vision of the landscape becomes more dreamlike and imaginative without neglecting the attention to the issues concerning the relationship between man and Nature. The painting is oil on canvas and mounted on wooden frame support. This is a unique piece of art, delivered with a certificate of authenticity. Frame not included. Ask the Concierge for further information.
Ryman has used a wide variety of paints since the 1950s, from gloss and semi-gloss to matte, from thin to viscous, and he handles them in many different ways to subtly nuanced effect. His supports range similarly, from industrial metal to linen to canvas, and finally to the wall itself. The wall, the light quality and the overall spatial confines each play an active role in the experience and meaning of Ryman's works, whatever their size and no matter what the interaction between paint and support.
The top of the painting is completely bare, just the canvas edge against the wall. Water is applied to the two sides and bottom edge, forming watery strips sharply edged with a knife. Pure color impregnates the water, spreading along the narrow margins. On the left side, there is violet and blue, with a stained effect from both that is pale aqua. The water stays clear on the bottom and the color moves from darker purple from left to bright red, then a beautiful phthalo green rising from below, culminating in a dark phthalo blue. Turning up the right-hand side, all the color is red.
For Francis, as with all Abstract Expressionists, painting represented personal transformation; as an American in Paris, he was linked to tachisme, a postwar reinvigoration of the impressionist touch. Tachisme practitioners Nicolas DeStael and especially Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze), established abstraction minus the American scale. In Paris, Francis filled his apartment from floor to ceiling with canvases with crepuscular paintings from 1952 onward, which over time shifted from white to black with hot color underneath. They reveal his definition of color as light on fire.
About the writer Elisabeth Condon is a painter, who recently completed the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation Artist Residency in New Berlin, NY. Her free-flowing, synthetic landscapes compress time and place within multiple paint applications and references. You can view her work in Brooklyn at Highland Park, in a mural produced by Norte Maar, Miami at Emerson Dorsch, and @elisabethcondon on Instagram.
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