Cela qui gronde 1967

This painting, by Huguette Arthur Bertrand, uses loose strokes of black, orange and beige, like an approaching storm. I wonder how many layers it took for her to get to this final image. You know how it is: you put down a mark, then another, and each one leads you somewhere new. Looking at it, I imagine Bertrand might have been thinking about Franz Kline or Pierre Soulages, other painters who made black sing on the canvas. But there’s something else going on here, a sensitivity, especially in those flashes of orange, which keeps it all open and searching. There's a beautiful dance between control and accident. The painting feels like a reminder that art is a conversation across time. We painters are always in dialogue with each other, picking up on each other's cues, learning from each other's experiments, so we can go back to the studio and make something new.