On painterliness…

Barbershop: Afrosheen, 2007, oil on canvas, 208 x 250cm. Private Collection London. [fig.1]

Painterliness is a term that people throw around a lot, without qualifying or defining it on its own.  In a formal sense, it is the space of light and shadow created by colour, rather than by form, in a composition.[1] As such, painterliness connotes a more complicated manner of painting that deviates from the rote rendering of lines.  It is this connotation that can be expanded into the discussion of contemporary art and extended to define the visual qualities of other media. The first time that I saw Hurvin Anderson’s paintings, they were, in fact, not paintings but prints.

Technically, they were colour etchings from his first print portfolio, Nine Etchings (2005).Despite their process, they retained the expansive idea of painterliness for which he is known. The entire set appeared to be a riff on a view.

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