21.1.75 1975

John Hoyland made this on January 21st, 1975. Look at these marks! And the red, green and blue palette. I can just see him, Hoyland, troweling on that paint, probably fast, but also slow, thinking, rethinking, moving it around like mud. Imagine all those colors being pushed together, layered, the red kind of screaming against the more settled green and blue. It's thick in places, thin in others. See the way the red paint drips down? That's not an accident; that’s the painting taking on a life of its own. I bet Hoyland was thinking about color field painting, maybe Rothko, but he's also doing something totally his own, something rawer. There's so much energy here. It reminds me of a conversation between painters, each one adding something, responding, arguing, agreeing. Painting is always about this back-and-forth, an ongoing exchange of ideas, of ways of seeing, feeling, and being in the world.