Double Nautilus 1973

Alexander Calder made this gouache painting, Double Nautilus, using bright, bold colors and simple graphic forms. I love how he’s gone to town with the black outlines, giving the painting a real pop. You can almost feel him, can’t you, moving the brush around and around, creating those whirling spirals? Painting is like a form of note-taking. As artists we make decisions on the fly, in response to what’s already there. See that orange spiral kind of bursting forth, and how he's echoed it with the orange stripes in the bottom left? What’s so great is how it's offset by those vertical black stripes, which create a bit of visual tension. Calder, Miro, Arp—they were all in conversation, bouncing off each other, weren't they? And that’s what I love about art—it’s an ongoing, messy, ambiguous conversation!