The Family 1955

Charles Alston’s painting, *The Family*, is built up from ochre, blacks, blues, reds, and greys, in rectangular and geometric forms that shift and emerge through intuition. I sympathize with Alston here. I can imagine him thinking about how to create a portal into family intimacy using paint. The paint is applied in thin layers, but look closely, and you can see how those layers accumulate into blocks and shapes. Take the way Alston has painted the hands of the seated figure, clasped in their lap, like a blue mountain range. This communicates a feeling of quiet strength, of a calm center. I imagine Alston, searching, and placing the shapes, feeling his way through the painting. This search puts Alston in line with other painters thinking about form and feeling, like Marsden Hartley or Alice Neel. Artists are always in an ongoing conversation, inspiring one another’s creativity. It’s a kind of embodied expression, an embrace of ambiguity that allows for multiple interpretations.