Walter Price, Florida man, 2019, acrylic, gesso, and encaustic on wood, 18 × 24"
The paintings Walter Price showed in “Pearl Lines” are a joyous combination of the carefree and the committed. Their sensibility is earnest, and their carnivalesque style engaging without looking labored. Price finds redemptive qualities in the most apparently dashed-off and blasé decisions. He takes risks. Figurative detail competes with compositional expediency, and at their best the paintings edge into abstraction and sit back, relaxed. Scrapped and scattered marks read both descriptively and as gesture, as in Different day, same confusion (all works cited, 2019), where daubs of orange and red catching the sharp edges of older acrylic layers are set aflame.
