Candy Crush for Grown-Ups
This painting looks like a jazz band got loose in a ribbon store.
Tall stripes. Fat brushstrokes. Pinks that flirt, oranges that shout, blues that anchor the whole party before it floats into space. The eye keeps sliding up and down these vertical lanes like it’s reading a secret code, except the code mostly says: color has rhythm, and rhythm can absolutely run a room.
You can feel the DNA of Gene Davis here in those stripe-driven structures, with a little Sean Scully in the stacked weight of the forms and a whiff of Matisse in the fearless color confidence. There’s also that contemporary abstract habit of letting crisp order and loose painting share the same apartment. They bicker. It works.
The big art idea hiding in plain sight is rhythm. Painters use repetition the way musicians use a beat. Repeat a line, shift a width, interrupt it with a chunky block of color, and suddenly your eye starts moving in tempo. That’s why this piece feels alive. You’re not just looking at color—you’re traveling through it.
FUN FACT
And the brushwork matters. Some passages are smooth and flat, others drag and streak and leave receipts. That contrast gives the painting its pulse. Fun fact: stripe paintings can be wildly emotional even when they’re built from something as simple as repeated lines. Agnes Martin proved that with quiet grids. Gene Davis did it with swagger.
Available as a Print
Related works
The Face That Swallowed the Sky
This looks like Picasso got into a toy box and came back nicer.
Too Much Is Never Enough
This looks like a piñata exploded inside a supercomputer.
The Garden Took a Breath
She appears to have reached the advanced stage of relaxation where even gravity has stopped making demands.