The Thaw Comes Up From Under

A thaw is not a gentle event. We use the word as though it means softening, and it does, eventually — but the middle of a thaw is the most violent week of the year on a northern river. Ice a meter thick does not melt politely in place. It is levered apart from below by water that has been rising all week under the lid, and it goes with a noise you can hear from a kilometer away. This painting is about that week, not about spring.

The composition is built on a single diagonal act of force. A dark channel of meltwater drives from the upper edge down through the center, and everything else in the frame is a consequence of it — slabs of chalk-white and bone-colored ice shouldered up onto their edges, tipped, stacked, shoved aside, the palette-knife strokes laid down thick and dragged so that each slab keeps the physical record of the tool that made it. You can see where the knife lifted. That matters. In abstract expressionism the gesture is not a means of depicting the event; the gesture is the event, and a painting about ice being levered apart should itself look like something that was levered apart.

The color argument is temperature, and it runs in one direction: upward from under. The whites and slate greys sit on top, flat and cold, lit by the kind of featureless overcast that hangs over a river valley in March. Then, forcing up through every crack in them, comes the warmth — ochre, burnt sienna, a deep rust-umber, a bruise of olive in the lower right. These are the colors of the riverbed, of silt and rotting leaves and the whole living underneath that has been sealed away since November. The painting reads correctly only if you understand that the warm passages are not light falling on the ice but something arriving from beneath it.

There is a moment in the lower center where the knife scraped back through a white slab to reveal ochre underneath, and that small passage is the thesis of the picture in miniature. The warmth was already there. It was there the whole time, under the lid, all winter. Nothing new has been added to the river in March. The only thing that has changed is that the ice can no longer hold the lie of a flat white surface, and what was always underneath begins, violently and without apology, to come up.

Thaws feel like arrivals. They are actually disclosures.