Celebration 2005

Will Barnet made this print called 'Celebration' with what looks like a planographic process. You know, maybe lithography or screen printing where the artist works on a flat surface to build up layers of color and shape. I can imagine Barnet shuffling shapes around, maybe he made little paper cut-outs and then moved them on the plate until something clicked. He's using a limited palette here – blues, browns, tans – but he gets a lot of mileage out of them, creating a sense of depth and movement with the relationships he sets up between the figures and the background. There's a blocky brown form at the center, but also what look like two blue stylized figures, positioned in an almost architectural setting. Look at the base of the image! See the blue and brown marks which seem to hold the composition in place? In a painting, a gesture like that could be a moment of pure instinct but here it anchors the piece in a very real way. Barnet's images really reflect how artists have always riffed off each other, stealing and sharing ideas across generations. The history of art is just one big conversation, isn't it?