Silver Girl Side a 2016

David Michael Hinnebusch made "Silver Girl Side A" using paint and collage. I see the artist wrestling with an image, maybe more than one, as if trying to remember a face or a scene, building up the surface with layers of erasure and overpainting. It’s all there – the taupe, the white, the black – in this strange, unsettling portrait. There’s a tension between the graphic elements, like the figure in the center, and the more abstract passages of smeared and scrubbed paint around the edges. But that’s how memory works, right? Fragments floating in and out of focus. I love the way the artist isn’t afraid to let the painting stay unresolved, with traces of what came before still visible underneath. It reminds us that painting is a process of constant discovery. An image comes into being, only to dissolve again. The work of other painters seems to be in conversation with the painting, creating and inspiring new ones, a constant exchange of ideas across time.