Red Bed Sheets 2014

William Balthazar Rose made this painting, “Red Bed Sheets,” with oils. I imagine him building up that lurid ground, that red sea of paint, thick and glossy and clotted, like…well, you know. Look at the way he’s modeled the figure, too, in this sort of feverish, Fauvist, way; the greens and mauves in the face. It feels like he's really looking, like he's interested in the actual stuff of paint and how it describes a body. It reminds me of someone like Bonnard, how he used a kind of sensual, domestic space as an alibi for intense experiments in color and feeling. That red object she’s holding—a pillow, maybe?—looks almost like a wounded animal, held up against her body. He's not shying away from the awkwardness, the messiness of bodies and desires. And that, I think, is what makes this painting so compelling. It’s as if the artist is saying: this is me, this is what I see, this is what I feel. Like painters always have, and always will.