Townscape P1 1968

Gerhard Richter, sometime in the mid twentieth century, made this painting called Townscape P1 using oil paint. What grabs me right away is how Richter approaches the paint. He's not trying to hide the process. You can see each brushstroke, each decision laid bare. It's like he's saying, "Here's how I see the world, one mark at a time." Looking closer, I see how the grays do so much. The way he layers them, thick in some spots and thin in others, creates this cool sense of depth. The surface is almost gritty and in that lower left corner there's this blocky white building that seems to be pressing forward and those tiny flicks that form a grid of windows on the side give a sense of scale, but also the opposite, flattening everything out at once. Richter’s been a big influence on a lot of painters like me, always pushing the boundaries of what painting can be.