Woolhara 1986

Albert Irvin made this vibrant abstract painting called Woolhara using broad, energetic brushstrokes and a playful color palette. It's all about the process, the joy of applying paint to canvas. The texture is pretty juicy, isn't it? You can almost feel the thickness of the paint, especially in those horizontal bands of orange and yellow. And the way he's layered those colors, sometimes letting them bleed into each other, gives the painting a real sense of depth and movement. Look at that brown stripe cutting across the bottom – it anchors the whole composition, giving a sense of weight to all that exuberant color above. It’s as if he’s saying, "Here’s a bit of earth to ground all this joyful chaos." Irvin reminds me a bit of Howard Hodgkin, with their shared love of color and bold gestures. But where Hodgkin is all about capturing fleeting impressions, Irvin is more interested in the sheer physicality of paint and the act of painting itself. It’s a conversation across time, where each artist picks up the brush and adds their own voice to the mix.