Fast Sketch Still Life with Abstract Painting 1989

Tom Wesselmann made this "Fast Sketch Still Life with Abstract Painting" with what looks like lithographic crayon, all curvy lines and flat planes of color, like he's wrestling with some Matisse cut-outs, but making it look easy. Look at that juicy red line, boldly going around the perimeter of… something. An apple? A head? I don’t know, but it's like he’s daring the form to emerge. The way he uses color here is very confident. These are not colors that necessarily ‘go,’ but they vibrate with life. And then there are these scribbly pale pink marks that look like maybe an erasure, or a ghost of something that was there before. The whole thing feels immediate and unfussy. Like a Cy Twombly, Wesselman reminds us that art is about the process. It’s about the doing, the trying, the failing, and the trying again.