Don’t Rock The Boat 2020

Kayla Mahaffey made this painting, Don’t Rock the Boat, sometime in the 20th century. It's like she's mixing memories with pure imagination; the colors are so bright they almost vibrate, right? Look at the way the stripes on the girl's shirt play against the water. The surface is smooth, but those little drips and dots around, they tell a story of how the paint was laid down, kind of intuitively. It’s as though we're seeing the world through a kid’s eyes. That red circle in the background. It's not just a sun; it’s like a punctuation mark, or a burst of energy. What do you think it means? It reminds me a bit of Kerry James Marshall, especially how he uses flat planes of color to make you think about history and identity. It's an ongoing conversation, this painting thing.