This was such a good show overall. Seeing this exhibit happened to converge right with the moment I was becoming a painter. Entering only with a naive interest in Pollock I left with a varied vocabulary and a new direction in my painting.

Often I think about our situation in 2014, and I relate it to the challenges of mid century painters trying to synthesize and find their own voices in the monuments of the European masters. Today the problems are similar. How do we find our own originality when it seems like everything has already been done?

The answers history gives us are comforting but incomplete. We can look at the success of the Greeks incorporating the Egyptians, or the Muslims the Christians, or even how the Abstract Expressionist reinterpreted the Modernists, but we can’t tell now where the future will bring us, or how we will re-imagine the past ourselves. We can only put brush to canvas and push forward.