Still Life with Lemon 1975

Alexander Bogen made this small painting, Still Life with Lemon, with oil on canvas, and what strikes me is how he’s built it up from blocks of color. The painting has this real material presence, you know? It's not trying to trick you into thinking it's anything other than paint on canvas. The white paint is dragged across the canvas in thick strokes, almost like plaster, while the blue is thinner and more translucent. It's like Bogen is playing with different kinds of paint, letting each color do its thing. I keep coming back to that blue square, slightly off-center, with a splodge of orange inside, framed with a dark table edge. It feels like a little world in itself, a kind of emotional focal point for the whole piece. This reminds me a bit of Milton Avery, in the way that both artists reduce things to their simplest, most colorful forms. And like Avery, Bogen invites us to slow down and really look, to find the joy in the everyday.