Albers Light 2000

David Michael Hinnebusch made "Albers Light," a one-metre-square painting with mixed media on board; it's an invitation to explore how a painting comes into being. Look at the scraped and striated pastel palette and the confident strokes of black paint: you can imagine Hinnebusch working, layering, and then scraping back, revealing the ghosts of previous marks. A push and pull. I wonder if this work came about through a period of trial and error, maybe even a little struggle, before it arrived at this image. There is a loose grid here that seems to echo Albers's Homage to the Square paintings. But the gesture! That confident swoop of black paint! I like to think of artists in conversation, riffing off each other. With paintings in particular, it's like one artist leaves a message, and another one responds. It's an ongoing process, a dance across time. I wonder what Hinnebusch would say about that?