Child of the Oil

“One of the last paintings to be finished in the series, I was, again, in the MoMA when I saw this thick black canvas by Daniel LaRue Johnson, called Freedom Now and the sea of black I saw, with figures jutting out the canvas, was so interesting, so unique, that it jarred loose a painting that’d been lodged in my head for many months now. I think about what our country would look like if it had a face. It’d be a child–our democracy still young–and it’d be an angry painting, frustrated almost. A Child of the Oil. It’s poetic maybe, that what we once swam in, is exactly what is now drowning us.”