About This Book
Reading Beneath, Behind, and Between
“If good art illustrates anything at all, it’s likely to be a story you didn’t even know
needed telling.” – David Salle
In the introduction to his 2016 book, How to See, painter and critic David Salle wrote,
“Art is more than a sum of cultural signs: It is a language both direct and associative,
and has a grammar and syntax like any other human communication.”
This analogy, while complex and expandable, is useful in “reading” contemporary
painting. Think, then, of the three painters in this exhibit – Jack McWhorter, Patricia
Zinsmeister Parker, and Earl Iselin – as writing in dialects. Each of their respective
dialects is in its way a discreet synchronicity, or a dialogue, transpiring in unique terrains
wherein the painter straddles the fluctuating boundaries between representation and
abstraction.
