Broken Arc 1994 - 1997

Jacob Kainen made this large painting, Broken Arc, with oil on canvas, but we don't know when. The whole painting feels like a process, where the brushstrokes themselves are the subject. There's a delicious pink circle dominating the space, but it's not just sitting there; it's built up with layers, like he kept adding to it, revising, rethinking with each stroke. The paint isn't super thick, more like transparent washes building on each other. It's as if Kainen is showing us how a painting comes into being, with all the starts and stops. Down in the lower part, you can see these loose, scribbly lines in orangey hues cutting across the cooler blues. They don't quite resolve into anything recognizable, but they create this lovely tension, this feeling of something emerging. It reminds me a bit of Joan Mitchell's gestural abstraction, where the act of painting feels more important than depicting a specific thing. With Kainen, it’s like he's inviting us to witness the beautiful mess of creation.