Paint laid on with a knife

How it is physically made is half the meaning. Most oil paintings are brushed: pigment carried across the canvas in strokes, thin enough that the picture sits more or less flat on the surface. Still did something else. He worked much of this paint on with a palette knife (a flat, blunt blade, like a small flexible trowel), pushing thick oil across the canvas in heavy, crusted layers. This is impasto, paint laid on so thick it stands up off the surface in ridges, and Still uses it not as an accent but as the whole skin of the picture. Up close the surface is built up, tactile, the drag-marks of the knife frozen in the buildup. The painting is, in a real sense, a crust.

And the colored areas do not end the way painted shapes usually end. There is no clean outline, no drawn boundary, nothing ruled. Where one color meets another, the edge is torn: ragged, irregular, flame-like, the way a sheet of paper rips rather than the way a line is drawn. Still does this on purpose and does it everywhere, so that a field of yellow seems to have been peeled out of the black around it, or the black to have been pulled back to reveal the yellow underneath. The picture reads as one continuous skin of color that has been ripped open, not as a set of shapes arranged on a backdrop.

That word, field, is the one to hold onto, because it marks how different this is from almost everything that came before it. For centuries a picture was an arrangement: things placed within the frame, balanced against one another, a subject set off against a background, the whole worked into a resolved design. Even the abstraction around Still kept some of that logic, Rothko’s rectangles hovering in their soft order, Newman’s single zip dividing a calm plane. Still threw the arrangement out. He built instead an all-over field, color spread edge to edge with no center to settle on, no figure standing in front of a ground, no balanced design to admire. The eye finds no comfortable place to rest, because there is no arrangement to read, only a surface and its rifts.

So the making and the meaning are the same fact. The troweled crust, the torn edges, the refusal of a composition: each is a way of insisting that the painting is not a designed picture of anything but a raw, continuous thing in its own right.