Noah Dillon from artcritical asked me to comment on the painting, "The Revolution Will Be Painted," featured in this video, "...[Its] 15 feet wide by 11 feet high, and was originally a drop cloth I had used on the floor of several different studios... I used latex paint for the large indigo Rorschach shapes and the field of red. The multi-colored chevrons are in acrylic with colored pencil guidelines...Of course the role of painting — here, now, and historically — is highly contested, but also beloved. It’s a medium that’s simultaneously well understood and mysterious. And it’s who I am; I can’t separate it from how I picture the world. More to the point, I see painting as a revolutionary act that resides within the individual. Both painting and any personal revolution happens first inside one’s own consciousness before its can be expressed in the material world. The title represents how important I think painting is and that it’s as effective and stirring as performance, or any other art form or activist statement for that matter."
The anthem I recite was originally published in ART21 Magazine, December 2014. I adapted Gil Scott-Heron’s poem to express what I was talking about: that revolutionary acts are part of the process of painting and have to do with seeing, and the changeability and strength of subjectivity. And it’s a textual version of that same urge. I read through all the art books I have, collecting sentences that jumped out at me, describing work by everyone across the ages from Willem de Kooning and Jean-Michel Basquiat to Cecily Brown and Edouard Manet. There are about 40 footnotes. I fit those lines into Scott-Heron’s cadence, using excerpts where the writer hits on that flame you find in good painting." - See more at:artcritical.com/2015/04/25/noah-dillon-with-anne-sherwood-pundyk/#sthash.eJfffbpH.dpuf
The painting was first exhibited at Gallery Sensei, LES, NY in "Milk and Night," September 2014.
HYSTERIA magazine selected the painting for the cover of its issue #5, which launched in New York at Otion Front Studio in September 2015. The painting was also exhibited in "Eye Machine" as part of Samadhi 0 at Sky Gallery, Brooklyn, NY September 2015. As an organic partner to the paintings, dancer and choreographer Leah Raphael Curtis, will performed an improvisational dance piece at the exhibition’s opening on September 9, 2015. In November, 2016, "The Revolution Will Be Painted" as included in "Reality of Abstraction," a group exhibition at The Schelfaudt Gallery, University of Bridgeport, Bridgeport, CT.