Dark Forest 1975

Milton Resnick made this painting called Dark Forest with dark paints and an impasto of marks. I imagine him, in the studio, moving the paint around, maybe adding and subtracting, finding his way through the darkness. Was he thinking about the war? I feel like the heavy texture and brooding color create an emotional landscape, but it’s also a record of the artist’s decisions. Look how thickly the paint is applied! You can almost see the movement of the brush, the weight of his hand as he worked. Resnick was part of the New York School, and you see his own thing happening here: a way to build up the surface, to let the materiality of the paint speak for itself. I get the feeling that he’s in dialogue with other painters, like de Kooning, but pushing it further into abstraction. It’s like he's saying something about what painting can do, how it can express feeling. I think it still speaks to us today, even though we’ve moved on to other things, it's still here, in the conversation.