Bard 2017

David Michael Hinnebusch made ‘Bard’ with what looks like acrylic paint, maybe some oil stick, too. I love the boldness of the marks! Yellow zigzags, the flag exploding with red and white marks, and then this figure kind of floating in the middle like a ghost. You get the sense that Hinnebusch was really going for it, not afraid to make a mess, change his mind, go over things. It's all there on the surface. I can imagine him stepping back, squinting, adding a slash of pink, then scratching into it, then dancing round the canvas. The paint is really worked; it's not just flat color, but full of texture and incident. And that inscription ‘No Thin Sells’ feels like a personal manifesto, a shout-out to all of us painters to get our hands dirty, to not be afraid of the material. It reminds me of Guston, Basquiat, all those artists who embrace the rawness and immediacy of paint. It’s like he’s saying, "Let's have a conversation, let’s make it messy, and see what happens."