Nest With Flowers 1978

Stefan Caltia created "Nest With Flowers" using paint, with a kind of innocent approach to colour and form. The way the colours have been layered feels really intuitive and process-driven. There’s a real depth to the surface of this painting, you can feel the layers of ochre and the kind of rose madder tones. It makes me think about a building slowly emerging out of the landscape. I particularly like the small details, like the potted plant on the chimney and the perfect little circles on the gable ends. They’re so simply rendered, but they add to the kind of childlike quality of the whole thing. Caltia’s work reminds me a little of Forrest Bess, in the sense that he's working in a visual language that's very much his own. This painting really celebrates the beauty of art's ambiguity.