Untitled c. 1950s

Franz Kline made this untitled painting with brush and ink on paper. Look at these marks. Are they windows? Are they scaffolding? You can see Kline experimenting here with layering and bold strokes. I think he might have been searching, like me, for the perfect balance between chaos and control. There's a certain physicality here, a wrestling with the materials. Notice how the thick daubs of green and blue create a kind of tension with the paper? It's like the painting is pushing back, resisting definition. I keep thinking of de Kooning. Those artists were always in conversation, pushing each other to explore the limits of what painting could be. Kline’s painting reminds me that art is an ongoing dialogue, a conversation across time and space. It leaves you wondering, doesn't it? It's more about the questions than the answers.