Metal-Yellow 1982

Dan Christensen made this painting, Metal-Yellow, with some kind of enamel on canvas and you can almost smell the fumes, right? I can imagine him sloshing the yellow paint across the canvas, letting it drip and pool in some areas, almost staining the surface. Then he takes a long, thin brush loaded with white paint and swooshes these elegant lines across the surface in a kind of cursive gesture. It is as if he is saying hello to us. I've never used enamel paint before, but I imagine the surface is super slick, which might have allowed the paint to move and slide in unpredictable ways. I wonder what kind of music he was listening to while he was making this. I see Larry Poons and even a bit of Twombly in this piece, but of course, Christensen is doing his own thing. Artists are always checking each other out, taking notes, and then going back to their studios to figure out how to make it their own.