Untitled (Buckets) 1995

Harmony Hammond created this painting of floating vessels, named 'Untitled (Buckets)', with oil on canvas. The surface is alive. Look closely, and you can see how the red ground pulses beneath the carefully placed buckets. The paint is applied wet-on-wet, and there's a real sense of improvisation, or "touch," in how Hammond coaxes the colors into being. Those cylinders, suspended as they are, invite a reading of gravity, and the movement of liquid, but there’s also something playful and totemic about them. Note the creamy impasto on the rims, contrasting with the thin, drippy lines that imply suspension, and perhaps also the leakage of the vessel's contents. The composition is so well balanced, and the space is, honestly, weird! Hammond’s work chimes with that of someone like, say, Jennifer Bartlett, in that they both use grids and seriality to explore the possibilities of painting, and to keep things open.