Yellow Music 1984

Robert Motherwell made this small but mighty painting with collage in 1984. I can just imagine how it came into being, shifting and emerging through trial, error, and intuition. I sympathize with him, and I can imagine Motherwell playing with scraps of printed matter, layering it with fields of yellow and bold blue verticals, and the big, black shapes that were his signature. The paint is kinda thin and washy, which lets the under-layers breathe. That black shape in the middle almost looks like it's dancing. Motherwell was always in dialogue with other painters, from the early modernists to his abstract expressionist buddies. Painting is like a big, ongoing conversation, an exchange of ideas across time. It's an embodied form of expression, embracing ambiguity and uncertainty, and it’s open to so many interpretations, never fixed, never really finished.