Existing comment:
Pick-Up Stick Paintings
Having acquired an assured discipline through the hand-held paintings, Irwin abandoned their small scale and churning gestures in favor of larger canvases that feature overlapping, coarsely painted lines on a monochromatic field. While the network of colorful, crisscrossing lines prompted the descriptive name "pick-up stick" paintings, Irwin's arrangements are not random or haphazard as in the children's game. Instead, like the hand-held paintings, the complex pictorial space in these compositions results from strategic juxtapositions of color, material, and mark making.
With their focus on line, the pick-up stick paintings reflect more clearly than the hand-held paintings that would become Irwin's signature method of honing in on a particular element in order to reduce painting to its very essentials. It was also through these paintings that Irwin concluded that the straight line best resists external associations or the impulse to identify a composition as a representation of something. In hindsight, it is ironic that the artist titled these works with references to the Ocean Park neighborhood of Santa Monica where his studio was located, particularly given our predilection to project an idea of landscape onto a horizontal line. |