Untitled c. 1970s

This untitled work by Gene Davis is an exercise in mark making, made with crayon or pastel. Imagine him, bent over the paper, building up the image with layered strokes. There's something really appealing about how the image is divided into zones, or bands: the upper part, a kind of grassy block of green, and then below, a horizontal plane made up of lines. You can see Davis working through different ideas: a straight, ruled line contrasted with small, idiosyncratic marks. The green section is interesting: vertical strokes make a block, almost like a hedge; a contained space versus the openness of the lower two sections. The materiality of the piece feels very present: the way the medium sits on the paper. It makes me think about other artists working in abstraction like Agnes Martin, who had such a strong sense of line. Artists are always in conversation, learning from, and responding to each other. In painting, as in life, we are constantly building on what has come before, making our own gestures of meaning.