St. Barts 10 1991

Brice Marden made St. Barts 10 with ink on paper, and right away you see the gesture, the mark-making front and center. It’s all about the doing, the process of the hand moving across the surface. The thing that grabs me is the way the ink sits on the paper - some lines are thick and solid, almost black, while others are faint, like a ghost of a line, barely there. Look closely and you can see how the ink bleeds and feathers into the paper. It's like the paper is breathing, absorbing the ink, each line a record of a single, decisive movement. There's one area in the top left corner where the lines seem to tangle and cluster together, creating this dense, almost chaotic energy. Marden's work always reminds me a bit of Cy Twombly, that same love of line and gesture, that sense of art as a kind of open-ended conversation. It's not about having all the answers, but about embracing the questions.