Landing 1958

Jean-Paul Riopelle made this large painting with oil paint, and it’s just packed with thick, juicy slabs of pigment in a range of blues, whites and blacks with sparks of red and yellow. I can imagine Riopelle in his studio, trowling paint onto the canvas with a palette knife – it’s almost sculptural. You can see the push and pull, the additions and subtractions as he worked and reworked the surface. There are so many different directions and textures here, some smooth, some jagged, like he's building up a whole world, a landscape almost, out of pure paint. I wonder if he was looking at a real place, or maybe a memory of a place, something filtered through feeling. It makes me think of other artists like Joan Mitchell, who built up these incredible surfaces, layer after layer. We all draw from each other, riffing on ideas and pushing them further. And it's so amazing because each painter is in the moment, with the uncertainty that brings. There’s no right or wrong way. The painting becomes a place where ideas come together, even when they don’t quite make sense.