In this new work on paper, I push further into a visual language I’ve been developing across a recent body of work—one that doesn’t quote Abstract Expressionism so much as continue its argument. A dense red field, built up from countless overlapping vertical strokes, becomes the ground on which threads of white and deep navy paint are flung, coiled, and left to settle. The marks feel less painted than released—gestures that pool and double back on themselves, calling to mind Pollock’s all-over drip fields and the restless, cursive loops of Twombly, while still tracing a path distinctly its own.
The color palette is unmistakably that of the American flag, yet the composition never resolves into stars or stripes. Instead, they dissolve into pure gesture—a field of accumulated energy that suggests both the physical labor of painting and the slower, harder labor of building and sustaining a nation over two and a half centuries. Near the bottom, white lines knot into dense, weighted circles; higher up, the marks loosen and thin, the red ground pales, and quiet notes of cream and pale blue surface from underneath.
Made to coincide with America’s semiquincentennial, this is a rare case of a painting conceived for the anniversary rather than retrofitted to it. It takes a practice already in conversation with postwar American painting and turns it toward commemoration—offering not a fixed emblem of celebration, but a living field for reflection, one whose weight will likely only grow as the milestone it marks recedes further into memory.
