Summer Streets (1995) captures the sensory overload and vibrant chaos of urban discovery that the artist experienced moving to the city from a rural life growing up. In the painting a young female figure in a white dress and braids stands at the composition’s center holding a melting ice cream cone. She is surrounded by the cacophony of city life—buildings stacked in impossible geometries, a purple car, street signs, and storefronts all competing for attention in a kaleidoscope of yellows, reds, blues, and greens.
The fragmented, collage-like composition anticipates the artists’ later recognitionist works, though here the multiplicity feels less controlled, more exuberant—the raw material of perception before it’s been organized into pattern. This piece offers collectors a rare glimpse into the artist’s formative vision, where the essential elements of his mature practice—dense layering, archetypal forms, spatial complexity—first emerge with youthful energy and unfiltered immediacy.
