Yellow Morning 1986

Carlos Almaraz made Yellow Morning with paint and a heck of a lot of energy sometime before 1989. It’s a wild, churning landscape—or is it a dreamscape?—painted with these slashing strokes and a color palette that’s both vivid and kind of unsettling. You can almost feel Almaraz attacking the canvas. The paint is thick, impastoed in places, and the marks are so raw and immediate, it’s like he’s wrestling with the image. There’s this incredible tension between the chaos of the brushstrokes and the suggestion of figures, buildings, plants emerging from the surface. Look at the way he renders the figures: they're barely there, just a few strokes of color, yet they have such a presence. It reminds me a bit of Soutine, that same kind of feverish intensity and willingness to distort reality to get at something deeper. Ultimately, Yellow Morning feels like a reminder that art isn't about perfection, it's about process, about the messy, unpredictable act of creation.