The Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, a friend of Mr. Marshall’s, noted that he is an intensely “deliberate” painter, and that Audubon’s obsessive meticulousness would naturally have appealed.

These decorative paintings of artificial flowers, flightless birds and exquisitely rendered birdhouses have an airless quality to them that stirs disturbingly.

I’m glad to pick up hints at how Mr. Marshall mixes what he calls a “fundamental” blackness that, in his words, “has volume [and] breathes.”

… Mr. Marshall painstakingly adjusts both the chroma (the warmth or coolness) and the value (the amount of light or dark) by mixing colors like raw sienna, chrome green, cobalt blue, and violet with black pigments.

(Ted Loos, “Kerry James Marshall’s Black Birds Take Flight in a New Series,” NYTimes, 7-29-20)

(c) 2020 JMN