Love 2014

Kent Monkman made this painting, called Love, with what looks like thin layers of acrylic, carefully built up. The marks are controlled and deliberate, it feels like the opposite of my painting studio! There's a tension in this piece between the kind of realism Monkman’s after and the abstract, symbolic language he’s working with. Take the houses in the background, they’re so carefully rendered you could pick out the window frames, but the carved figure in the foreground looks deliberately unfinished, raw. The figures are painted with a smooth, almost airbrushed effect, which flattens them out and makes them look like figures in a dream. I'm drawn to the way he handles color, it’s very contemporary, he's created a limited palette dominated by reds and blues which gives the image a feeling of harmony. Monkman reminds me a little of David Wojnarowicz; both artists share the impulse to challenge cultural norms. Like Wojnarowicz, Monkman embraces ambiguity, inviting us to question what we think we know about history, identity, and representation.