The Big Egg 1968

Ed Clark made this dreamy, horizontal, and oval painting, with loose brushstrokes, like a landscape, only more like a feeling of one. The horizon line is everything here. I imagine Ed standing in front of this canvas, thinking about Rothko, maybe Helen Frankenthaler, too, and all the other color field painters. What’s it like to be a painter in that moment? How do you make it yours? In painting, every gesture counts, because the whole history of painting is behind it. Look at the way the brushstrokes drag horizontally across the surface. The paint isn’t too thick, but it's also not too thin. It’s that perfect in-between place where the paint can breathe and have a life of its own. Painting is like one big, ongoing conversation, where artists borrow and steal and push each other to see the world in new ways. The way the light catches the surface, the way the colors shift and change, the way the painting seems to breathe – it's a reminder that painting is alive, and always evolving.