Tamed With a Frame: Sebastian Black

The work in 24-year-old, New York-based painter Sebastian Black's debut solo show, "The Playful Paw-Strokes of the Wilderness," sounds simple. At Chelsea's Kathleen Cullen Fine Art, he will show paintings of dogs comprising two gentle drooping curves that form a docile pet with long, flat ears. The enclosed space is filled with a patchwork of triangles, horns, and candy-colored pizza slices. Black's paintings have a thick, rich surface, and the longer you look at them, the more the shapes lend themselves to re-configuration as different characters, particularly a female nude. The experience of looking at Black's paintings is like Magic Eye or the primordial scene: you can only see the naughty truth, once the the puppy's nose is revealed as a swatch of pubic hair. Black's friend and mentor, Adam McEwen, asks him why it's necessary to tame his paintings:


ADAM MCEWEN: How many of these dog paintings do you think you have made so far?

SEBASTIAN BLACK: I think there are 11 or 12, only eight of which I am comfortable wrapping up and saying, "I'm done." And then there are a lot of other similar ones-dog piles of them.

MCEWEN: What do you call the paintings, when they're in the studio?

BLACK: Puppies.

MCEWEN: Are there grown-ups?

BLACK: These are the kinds of dogs that kids draw, and which would be young themselves, with big soft eyes and floppy ears.

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