Dusk 1958

William Baziotes made 'Dusk', an oil on canvas, and just looking at it, you can tell he’s interested in the push and pull of colour, in the act of making itself. There's a dialogue between the fuzzy grey backdrop and the floating characters. Check out the big, coral form on the left – it’s almost like a deconstructed letter 'H', full of awkward angles, existing in tandem with a ghostly, pale blue figure snaking across the canvas to the lower right. Then there’s that single, crisp white line that intersects it like a rogue thought. Baziotes isn’t hiding his process. The paint isn’t overworked; it's allowed to be itself, to breathe. 'Dusk' reminds me a little of Joan Miró, who also knew how to make a painting sing with just a few well-placed marks. It's a quiet piece, but it speaks volumes about the power of suggestion and the endless possibilities of abstraction. It seems to embrace ambiguity, inviting us to find our own stories within its shadowy depths.