"To see a slick lump of pure Sap Green [oil paint] glisten under the lights of my studio is a marvelous thing. Oil paint can be anything it wants to be. Its only limit is my own understanding.

When raw color presents itself as a three-dimensional object we are confronted with textures, smells, and gestures that cause our minds to blend the modalities of sculpture and painting. There is both the tendency to flatten what we see and to touch the objects, which are in opposition to each other yet find concurrency in my work. Oil paint has been subject to the artist’s desire for as long as it has existed. In my hands, however, oil paint lives and breathes. It searches for itself within the possibilities of sculpture for it already knows its limitless two-dimensional ‘self’. It has been the lightning of Zeus, the sorrow of Soutine’s hanging meat, the ‘light as air’ lilies of Monet’s ponds. Now it can be present in space and face the realities of gravity like all physical forms. Physicality is not merely a means to an end for oil paint; it contains all the joys and wonders of an undiscovered country. Oil paint has been freed and is no longer subject to modernism’s flatness or the illusory depth of academic painting. It now circumnavigates the material world coating everything it becomes with thick, luxurious color. New conversations will surround the oil paint object which gives rise to its transcendence as the ultimate vehicle for subjective and objective representation."

-Quinton Jones McCurine

Artwork pictured at the top of the page: Quinton McCurine, Tube amongst functional paint tubes, 2011. Oil paint.