oil painting by Ray Patrick
A large canvas of a dozen palms in silhouette against a field of red, their crowns across the upper half and their trunks falling the full height, hung on a white wall.
The crowns are set at deliberately uneven heights so the eye travels along a ragged line, and the trunks drop from each one to the bottom edge. There is no ground, no horizon and no sky — only the field.
Scarlet, crimson and oxblood through the ground, brightest at the upper right and deepening at the edges. The palms are a flat near-black with no colour of their own.
The ground is scraped and incised, with long marks cut into the paint that show as paler scratches and give the whole surface a worked, abraded texture. The palms are cut in flat over it, drawn last.
Oil on canvas, unframed, on a gallery wall. The largest of Ray's palm paintings in this group.
Lower right, a small monogram in dark paint.