Drips

Carolana Parlato
The Kiss
2007





Eric Sall
Icy Hot
2008





Christina Sucgang
Someday Maybe
2007





Wallace Whitney
no caption info






Jasmine Justice
Big Rock Candy
2006




Michael Cody Drury
Untitled
2006






Elizabeth Cooper
(no caption info)





Mary Heilmann
Go Ask Alice
oil on canvas
2006




One of my favorite things about Mary Heilmann's paintings are those fucked up drips. They communicate a kind of resignation. They're a shrug, an "oh well," a "sorry, I just couldn't help that..." It is a gesture without drama, not uptight, but, rather, in a casual, almost flippant, manner. This is a kind of giving up that accepts that it's giving up and learns to live with itself. It’s completely unheroic. It is not about "I am nature." It's simply nature, the nature of gravity. Nothing else. Paint drips. If you load the brush with too much paint it drips. And here is where the thing reverses itself. You see it is in this way that it's a form of trying too hard. The kind of trying too hard that usually fails, that comes on too strong, that, well, acts like a drip.