Shorelines 2016

Joshua Flint's painting "Shorelines" is full of ghostly figures in a muted palette, all rendered in soft, flowing oil paint. Look at the way the images and settings melt into one another, as if a curtain has been lifted on half-remembered dreams. I wonder about the act of making it, the back-and-forth of adding, erasing, obscuring, and revealing. The painting feels like a meditation on memory and time, like old photos gradually fading into abstraction. I think of other painters who create surreal worlds, like Philip Guston or Giorgio de Chirico, where figures become symbols and objects float free from gravity. This is a space where things are possible that could never happen in real life. The artist is in conversation with all those artists, and the next generation will learn from him, too. That's how it works! Painting is a living language, and each artist adds their own voice to the conversation. Paintings don't have to give us all the answers; sometimes, it's enough to ask the right questions.