Renewal 1977

Friedel Dzubas made *Renewal* with swaths of layered colour, like a landscape seen through a heat haze. I imagine him standing in front of a huge canvas, armed with brushes, scrapers, and maybe even rags. He’s layering translucent washes of colour—oranges and yellows mixing like honey, contrasting with cool blues and greens. You can see where he’s thinned the paint to almost nothing, letting it stain the canvas, and elsewhere it sits on the surface. That turquoise form on the left – is it a figure, a cloud, or a memory? See how it pushes against the yellow, creating a tension. Dzubas was part of a generation of colour field painters exploring the emotional potential of abstract forms. He's in dialogue with Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis. Painting is always a conversation, an echo of gestures across time. The act of painting itself is renewal – a chance to start again, to make something new out of something old. It’s never fixed, always open to interpretation, just like life.