Missing the Bounce
Turns out not playing padel is a terrible way to realize how much you like playing padel.
This one came from the sidelines. I’ve been injured recently and can’t play for a couple months, so the game has been living rent-free in my head: the quick reactions, the weird little angles, the ball coming off the glass, the satisfying chaos of a point that gets away from you and somehow comes back.
The painting feels like that. Hot pink, acid green, black, white — all of it moving at once. A figure appears, disappears, swings, reaches, slips back into the paint. It’s less a literal padel scene than the memory of one: noisy, fast, messy, and a little harder to sit out than expected.
That’s where gestural painting comes in. Critic Harold Rosenberg called this kind of work “action painting” because the brushstroke isn’t just describing movement — the brushstroke is the movement. The mark carries the speed, pressure, and emotion of the hand that made it.
You can feel a little de Kooning in the restless figure, a little Cecily Brown in the body dissolving into abstraction, and a little Joan Mitchell in those bright, unruly bursts of color.
Mostly, though, this is just about missing the thing.
The court. The sound. The chase. The laugh after a ridiculous point.
I’ll be back eventually.
Until then, I guess I’m painting rallies.
FUN FACT
This work rewards a second look: familiar forms become stranger as context, scale, and texture shift.
