Untitled 1952

This untitled painting was made by John Ferren and you can see how the painting process itself is front and center. It’s a party of blacks, reds, and blues doing the jitterbug all over a creamy white ground. The texture is alive; Ferren lets the paint be itself, sometimes thin and washy, other times thick and luscious. Look at that little dash of red near the bottom, the way it sits up from the surface, juicy and confident, a tiny exclamation mark. Then there's the blue splodge, all broken up and messy. The whole painting feels off-the-cuff, like Ferren was chasing something he could only half-see. Ferren reminds me a bit of Joan Mitchell, with her knack for making abstraction feel so deeply personal. But where Mitchell's paintings are these grand, sweeping landscapes, Ferren's are more like intimate little poems. They both embrace the messy, unresolved nature of painting, leaving plenty of room for us to wander around and make up our own stories.