Verticals II 1952

Karlo Zvirynsky made Verticals II with oil on canvas. I’m looking at these brown and ochre verticals and wondering how this painting came into being. Was it one of those things where the artist starts with an idea and then just keeps going, each mark informing the next? The paint seems kind of thick in places, like Zvirynsky was really building up the surface. I bet he was thinking about what it means to be vertical, to stand up straight, or maybe he was just into the rhythm of repetition. I like to think about the physicality of painting, like, what does it feel like to drag a brush across a canvas over and over? That one gesture, that one vertical streak, it's got a certain energy to it, you know? Painters are always in conversation with each other, stealing ideas, riffing off of what came before. I wonder what Zvirynsky was looking at when he made this. Anyway, it’s cool how a painting can be so open-ended, so up for grabs in terms of meaning. It's like the artist is saying, "Here you go, what do you make of this?"