The Blessing 1944

Barnett Newman made this drawing, 'The Blessing', with crayon, a material that's just so immediate and hands-on. Look at how he's built up this moody grey ground from layered strokes, leaving it soft and unresolved. It’s not so much about defining form as creating this vibrating field, almost like a force. And then these odd, kinda figurative shapes emerge, outlined in brighter colors – this blue, green, and red figure on the left is like a totem. The central form is encircled in orange with a strange diagram inside it, like a target or a map, or an eyeball! There’s a real sense of experimentation here, of the artist feeling his way through the process. Newman’s work always reminds me a little of Joan Miró, but without the playfulness. The Blessing shares something with Guston's late work too, that same raw vulnerability, that feeling of things being provisional and unresolved. It’s a reminder that art is a constant back-and-forth, never fixed, always open to reinterpretation.