Mill Worker (Night Shift) 1976

Ralph Fasanella gave us this peek into the "Mill Worker (Night Shift)" with paint, no date given, but you can imagine the act of painting itself, shifting and emerging through trial, error, and intuition. I sympathize with Fasanella, imagining what it might have been like to create this. What was he thinking when he made it? The paint looks quite matte, laid on in thin layers, each dab and stroke building up the image. The flatness almost makes it look like a print, and the effect is one of naive honesty. Look at the faces of the workers—each one is different! It's this kind of attention to detail that really makes the work sing. It makes me think of other painters like Horace Pippin or even Fernand Léger, artists who were deeply engaged with the world around them, and interested in the lives of ordinary people. Artists are in an ongoing conversation, inspiring one another’s creativity. Painting is embodied expression that embraces ambiguity, allowing for multiple interpretations.