Easel Painting 2004

Dale Hickey made this Easel Painting with clean lines and shapes. It's like walking into an artist's studio after they've stepped away for a moment. He’s captured that quiet, in-between time when nothing much seems to be happening but all the potential for creativity is just hanging there. I can imagine Hickey, brush in hand, surrounded by tubes of paint, the air thick with turpentine, figuring out how to turn his thoughts into something solid on the canvas. It's a deep dive into what it means to be a painter, a maker, a thinker. The colors are so self-contained, and those big shapes sit together, holding their own, like a conversation about how we see, how we put things together, how we make sense of the world around us. It's an ongoing conversation, like all art, echoing through time.