Broken Blue 1958

John Ferren made this painting, Broken Blue, with what looks like oil paint, but I can't be sure, it could be acrylic, and a lot of gusto. Ferren's got this field of blue, sort of teal-ish, not exactly cheerful but compelling. Then, bam! These stabs of yellow, those lines and blocks of ochre and umber, floating, colliding. It's like someone took a scene and shook it up, hard. Look at that thick yellow line near the center, how it bleeds into the blue around it. It is like a jolt of pure energy and the way it's been dragged through the blue suggests a kind of raw process, a real urgency to get something down. This reminds me a little of the early de Koonings, where the figure is almost there, but the paint is doing its own thing. There's a conversation happening, maybe a beautiful argument, between the artist and the medium. It’s not just about what he saw, but how he felt.