Printed Quilted Patches 1935 - 1942

This is a page of "Printed Quilted Patches," made by Francis Law Durand. Red is certainly doing a lot of work here! There are endless variations of marks, all these dabs and blobs in a limited palette, and it gets you thinking about color, but also about process, about the ways of working that become a kind of language. Look at number 20, in the lower right – it's so dense, the positive and negative space start to merge. Durand seems to be getting lost in the sauce, losing the figure-ground relationship, which, for me, is where things start to get interesting. It reminds me a bit of some of the obsessive qualities in the work of Forrest Bess, who was also interested in pattern and repetition, but also getting really into the nitty-gritty of mark making and vision. In the end, it’s like Durand is pointing out how art is a conversation and that it's all about what we bring to the table, embracing the multiple interpretations that come our way.