Amarillo 1958

Howard Mehring made "Amarillo" with paint on canvas, and right away you see that the making of it was really about the doing, the application, the gesture. He has all these little marks, like a field of dots, and they're not quite uniform but they read as this overall, shimmering haze of color. It's very material, even though the effect is quite optical. You can see the brushstrokes, how the paint is laid on thinly in these little daubs. There's a real sense of light, it’s all about color mixing and how one color sits next to another. Look how he uses yellow, orange, and blue to create this shimmering effect. The overall feel is light, but the grey blob at the top-left adds this strange tension, a kind of grounded weight, holding the picture down. Mehring's work reminds me a bit of the pointillist painter, Georges Seurat, but with a more intuitive, process-oriented approach. With both artists, there's a feeling that painting is an ongoing experiment, with no right or wrong answers.