Man in the Brick Wall 1972

Charles Garabedian made "Man in the Brick Wall" with a kind of naive yet knowing touch, layering color like he’s building something, brick by brick. The texture in this piece is just incredible, isn’t it? The way Garabedian uses color, it’s almost sculptural, giving the surface a real depth. Look at the man's back and shoulders: you can see how the light catches on those areas, how the artist uses these colors to create the illusion of form and weight. It's like he's building a wall and revealing a figure all at once. Garabedian reminds me a bit of Guston in his later years, that embrace of the awkward, the imperfect. Art, for Garabedian, is a site of continual discovery, not a place to arrive, but a place to begin.