There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

― David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

I went on sabbatical from teaching last year.  It is one of those things that I, a kid of working class parents, could never have imagined when I was younger.  My institution was enabling me to take time off of work to concentrate on my artistic development: to focus on my studio the way that I have been focusing on my students for the past 10 years.  This time was hard-won, precious; I was looking forward to it opening up for me.  I had a lot of ideas that had filled my sketchbooks over the years.  Also, I had bookcases of texts I could not wait to devour.  It had been so long since I had read anything for pleasure that I was so looking forward to curling up with all the tomes I had purchased that work had not allowed me to open.  Also, to be perfectly honest, I was looking forward to getting some rest. I purchased supplies and cleared out my studio for new work.  I was cleaned up my email and finished up school business.  I got to a clutter-free place. I thought about what was possible.

Then Michael Brown happened.

While news channels kept showing his body lying in the street for hours, we found out about John H. Crawford, III.

And then Ezell Ford.  And Dante Parker.  And Kajieme Powell. And more.  And many many more.  Some captured on grainy videos replayed on television and computer screens.

In the studio, I could not stop thinking about this march of death.  I painted almost every day and every day this parade of killing was on my television and radio and social media feed.  Some of the dead became Twitter hashtags.  Some did not, but they were no less dead.  Why were some people more important than others? Did people think that some victims more worthy than others of not being shot to death, or tased to death, or run over, or beaten to death by the state?

I was on sabbatical, so I had time.  Time to create turned into time to think, and I couldn’t think about anything other than death.  I didn’t read any books.  I painted.

It’s summer (July) and I’m at dinner with a friend.  We are in a bistro with televisions all over the restaurant and bar area.  The sound is turned down but the images light the entire place.   The video of Officer Daniel Pantaleo choking Eric Garner to death plays over and over and over interrupted by silent talking heads. I wonder why are they playing this man’s murder on a loop? People eat, drink, laugh, walk about.  No one seems to notice that a man is being choked to death on television.  Then I start to think that maybe they do see it and that it doesn’t bother them.  This is the first time I witness this, a black person being killed on television.  It will not be the last time.  Not by any measure.

Over my sabbatical, I saw black people shot to death on television over and over again.  News casters and pundits would issue verbal warnings that the video they were about the show might upset “sensitive viewers.”  I tried to imagine a viewer that would not be upset about seeing someone like Walter Scott shot to death (or that his killer, Officer Michael Slager, planted evidence on his corpse).  Or Tamir Rice shot to death.  I wondered why they didn’t tell the “insensitive viewers” to hook up their DVRs.  When I am in the studio, the images fill my head.  I jump when cars backfire.

People would ask me how my sabbatical was going.  They would say, “I hope you are taking advantage of this time.”  They would tell me how lucky I was.  They would ask, “What is going on in the studio?”  I wondered if they watched the news at all.  I wondered if they know about what was happening.  I wondered how they felt about these images of black people being killed.  I posted about this stuff on social media and it is ignored for the most part. Ferguson explodes.  Social media does not believe in tears.

In August of 2015, two reporters are shot to death on live television.  Alison Parker and Adam Ward are killed by Vester Lee Flanagan, II who uploaded video of the killing.  Immediately, the television station, Facebook, and social media erupted with requests for people not to view of share the video.  To maintain the dignity of the victims, people begged the public not to watch the video.  It would be a terrible thing to give the killer satisfaction by watching his murder of the reporters.  

I started to wonder why black people are allowed to be killed on television.  Why we are allowed to be transformed from subjects to objects and left to lie in streets for hours?  Why is it acceptable to show the end of a black life on television?

I start to make work about the historical impulse to turn violence against black people into part of our domestic structures.  People continue to ask me what I am doing on sabbatical.  I think of Neruda and I wish I knew Spanish.  (“Come and see the blood in the streets….”)  I decide to make a work about all the people killed by police while I was on sabbatical.  I dismiss the idea as too agitprop.  I talk to my mentors.  One of them tells me, “Make the work.  Just don’t trivialize.”  I work with a friend and learn how to make photographs.  It is harder than I imagined.  I finish this work, Family Pictures.  I show it to a few people.  I finish my sabbatical.  I’ve read few books.  I feel surrounded by ghosts.

I paint everything I think.  I don’t trivialize.  I realize a new body of paintings.  My studio is full of murderers, victims, liars, and accusers.

I return to work in September.  In December, I am hassled and detained by the police.  I write about the experience.  Many people want me to come and talk to groups to “raise awareness.”  I decline.  They seem to be unaware that I would not like to relive a traumatic experience in public. People want me to talk about #BlackLivesMatter.  The college intervenes and offers to handle calls from the press for me. I am deeply grateful because this allows me to concentrate on my job and my students.  CNN calls the college and wants to know if I will talk to Don Lemon.  I tell the school that I will talk to anyone at CNN except Don Lemon.  I get hate mail.

Lisa Tung, the Exhibitions Director asks me what work I want to put in the biennial faculty show.  I decide to make the piece I thought was agitprop.  I call Carmine, my neon fabricator.  I want him to make a sign that mimics police light that spells out what is lost.  I research police killings of unarmed civilians.  I find no central list.  I find no definitive list.  I find no government statistics.  I rely on activist sources.  I rely on The Guardian.  I make the piece.  It is installed in the faculty show.  It is a timeline.  It’s information: date, name, gender, city, state, method of killing. I title it A Partial List of Unarmed African-Americans who were Killed by Police or who Died in Police Custody During my Sabbatical from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, 2014-2015. 

There are 262 names.

A Partial List of Unarmed African-Americans who were Killed by Police or who Died in Police Custody During my Sabbatical from Massachusetts College of Art and Design 2014-2015

People tell me that they look at the wall and measure time.  They lift up the people in their thoughts.  Someone asks me if I am influenced by Maya Lin.  I answer that we all are influenced by Maya Lin.

Someone will say their names and they will be alive a little longer.

I am not a big Rolling Stones fan, but one song, Shattered, came up when I was listening to iTunes.  That ending part where Jagger sings, “Pile it up/Pile it high on the platter!” stuck in my head.  It was like some sort of vile command at an obscene banquet.

banquet, first version

This painting was on my studio wall for years.  I thought it was finished.  It was weird because it didn’t feel like my work, even though I had painted it.  I had a connection to it since I had made it, but I had a tremendous amount of distance from it.  I couldn’t figure out what it did for me or why I couldn’t claim it as my own.  But it stayed on the wall.  For years.

banquet, second version

Every now and again, I would paint on this picture.  I’d change some things, try some things.  At these times, the painting wasn’t really a painting at all.  It was more of a site.   I mean that in real terms. It was an actual location I could go to where I could try things out and let things happen.  I would repaint the entire picture sometimes and then wipe all of the paint off to return it to the way it was.   At these times I felt like I was rehearsing something.  Like I was trying out new material before I had to present it or something.  Those changes built up over the years.

I was in my studio about a week ago and I looked at the picture.  The head on the far left started to look familiar to me.  I know that sounds stupid since, after all, I had painted it, but it seemed like I had seen the painting somewhere else.  The more I looked at it, the stronger this feeling became. I realized that I had painted another version of that head for a painting called the notice. It wasn’t an intentional action, but I saw that I was able to make one painting because I had made the other.  I had been painting on the notice for years.  I was able to resolve it, finally, once I painted the head in the other painting.  Like I said, it wasn’t an intentional thing.  It was only after looking at the picture for a long time that I could see what it had been giving me.

the notice (2001-12) oil on panel, 12×12 inches

Almost every head in this picture lives in another painting at this point.  It’s been a series of migrations.  They came in one picture and moved into another one.  It makes sense to me that I couldn’t finish banquet because it was never meant to be a painting – it was meant to be a site of possibility that led to other paintings.

I repainted the picture last week.  Everyone who had to leave, who could  leave, has gone.  There is only one that remains in light, balanced aggressively in the in-between space.  It’s trapped in a moment where it is a portrait and an object.

after a banquet (2011-2015), oil on panel, 16 x 20 inches

the answer, 2014-15, oil on panel, 18 x 24 inches

I have been working on this painting for about a year now.  It did not start out looking like this.

I had a photograph as a reference for this painting.  I don’t normally work from photos; it’s too difficult for me. I start to feel some kind of weird responsibility, as if the painting won’t be good if it doesn’t look like the photo. I start to get plagued by these aggressive thoughts about correctness and precision that have nothing to do with anything that interests me because the photo becomes the measure of quality.  I ended up getting very uninterested in the painting.  I put it away.

When I took the painting up again,  I was thinking of sanding the whole thing down and making a new painting, but for some reason I didn’t.  I started thinking about how unsatisfied I was with it and that got me thinking that maybe I could make a painting about satisfaction.  And if I could, what would such a painting look like. Are there painterly equivalents to being satisfied?  I started thinking about the last painting I looked at that I could say I felt satisfied.  Not pleased, not interested, not impressed, but satisfied.

At the Armory Show this year, I saw a Jocelyn Hobbie picture called Bee, Yellow, Indigo at Fredericks and Freiser.  I had never thought much about her work because I had only seen it in reproduction and seeing it in reproduction allowed me to completely misunderstand it.  The cliche exists because it’s true-the painting is better in person.  Magazine reproductions of Hobbie’s paintings make them look illustrative.  What I thought was simple geometry is an almost lapidary arrangement of color that makes up undulating and energetic forms that swirl like energy.  Like a Klimt painting, it is an image of tremendous confidence and erotic power.

What is so satisfying about the Hobbie painting was that every single moment is realized and held in tension with every other moment.  What looks like an illustration in reproduction actually looks like a hallucination in person.  There is a sense of air and movement in the picture that I was not expecting when I saw it.  She has painted this person as something more than a person.

This sense is enhanced by her technical restraint – it is what stops the painting from being an academic exercise of “solving painting problems.”  Her use of painterly processes are in service to creating this sensation about this person in addition to a sense of visual satisfaction.

A painting has to be more than a demonstration of the fact that the painter solved a problem.

I don’t think about process when I am working.  I think that is because the act of painting requires me to think about so many things at the same time.  I am never thinking about “the process” because it isn’t really something that is outside of me.  If I tried to make paintings about process, I fear that they would become a concatenation of painterly effects, “full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing.”  I’ve never been able to be satisfied with process for its own sake.  This may be a reason my work has always been about the figure.  I have always had a subject. It would not occur to me make paintings about process independent of subject.  The subject drives the kind of processes I would and do use.

I have been thinking about Hobbie and a few other artists a lot in the studio these days.  I’ve been seeking out their work and looking deeply at it for some answers.  I struggle greatly with painting because I am after something that I see less and less in contemporary art and I think that thing is satisfaction.  That is not to say that I am looking for art that is simple, or uncomplicated, or facile. What I think is that I am looking for an art that operates outside of the language and techne of marketing and spectacle.  I remember a studio visit with Nayland Blake I had back in 2002.  I was going on about how I wanted to make work that talked about a sense of desire.  Blake said to me, “Desire is the only thing that is produced in late-stage capitalism.  Everyone knows about your desire.  What we don’t know about is your pleasure.”  Thinking about that conversation now, I see the link between pleasure and satisfaction, between process and image.

Cupid and Psyche had a daughter.  Her name is Pleasure.

what wasn’t thought possible, 2015, gouache and egg tempera on panel, 8 x 10 inches

Painting is a way to see if something is possible.

In a real way, exploring a motif is an investigation to see if it is possible to be painted.  I wonder sometimes if something cannot be painted.  Wondering is pointless, however, because the only way to know is something is paintable is to try to realize it as a painting.  This is the difference between a theory and an action.  All my understanding about painting comes from figuring these things out in material. I can’t make a theoretical decision about art before I make something.  This kind of analysis can only take place in the presence of something.  Otherwise I would talk myself out of doing anything because there is always a reason NOT to do something.  But in the right hands, a still life painting can be a radical assertion. (I’m thinking of the brilliant Janet Fish in particular.)

The challenge is to make something even though there is nothing left to make. The challenge is to question the notion of the unpaintable, the unsayable, the unseeable.

Sometimes I make a successful picture that contradicts what I think a picture can do, or should do. Sometimes I make something that I do not recognize as my own work.

These are paintings that teach me about the paintings I need to make.  They also point to the work that I am still in the process of learning how to make.

Core to my art making process is to make art out of horror.  The current moment presents us with no shortage of that.

My challenge is to make work that speaks to the time without trivializing.  My challenge is to compete with spectacle.

Anthony Palocci, Jr. Looking Up, 2015, oil on canvas, 60×96 inches. Studio view.

Steve Locke:  I think you are making some very challenging and gorgeous paintings, they were a high point of the last DeCordova Biennial. The ones that Lexi Lee Sullivan chose for that show married a haptic and almost brutal paint handling to elegant and bravura drawing. The result was spell binding. Like Vija Celmins, you managed to imbue everyday objects with an interior life. And at the same time, there was an assertion of modernist flatness and vivid surface that referenced Jasper Johns. Even the picture that Robert Moeller included in his pop up show, Yeah You Missed It, contained this dichotomy between the depicted and the felt.

My question is how does the idea of restraint inform your selection of imagery, your approach to color, and practice as a painter?

Anthony Palocci, Jr.:  It’s kind of funny for me to think about restraint. I haven’t thought about that in such depth until this question…

The first restraint I may have set up for myself was that whatever I painted must be manufactured. Whatever I paint cannot be organic or naturally occurring, it has to have been manipulated somehow. Whether it was built in a factory, sent through a meat grinder, or put through a mill, it’s got to be assembled by some form of fabrication. I think this focus stems from wanting to talk about people. I decided that I could say a lot more about people by painting images of the objects they created rather than depicting the people as themselves…

I used to paint a lot of people as people but there was a conflict of interest there because I didn’t want to talk about the individual. The individual was a very messy idea for me, something too complicated as one gets wrapped up in their story…Seeing someone in a painting, one identifies with that person as being of the same form and therefore empathizes with them; whoever they are, as they are depicted. At that point you’re too far into the painting for me…I needed to keep more of a distance between the painting and myself/the viewer/my audience…

By this “restraint” as you call it, I have boiled down my big ideas to the essential stuff I want to get at. By making a selection of a larger picture I eliminate everything else I don’t want to paint. I get distracted easily a
nd the world is such a vast place I need to discipline myself to hone in on one thing at a time. It’s really what keeps me grounded, to take one thing out of life and spend time with it. Even these objects have a story though, but it’s less literal than a person’s story because these objects are inanimate. They don’t have brains or blood. They have electricity, oil and motors. For now in my selection of imagery I have solved the first major problem I had as a painter, “What do I paint?”, and now I can get on with it…

Color is a whole other box of rocks. Color is so overwhelming to me now more so than ever because I am teaching color to students. Not only does one have to decide, “What do I paint?” but one must decide, “What Color do I use?” you could also ask, “How do I describe this?” or “Is it invented or observed?” and then there is the “Why then? How come?” to every answer you end up with…

I used to just grab any tube of paint that looked good at the time. Then that became problematic. Color is delicious and it is very easy to overindulge. Color is distracting because it is emotional. I can’t have color break my composure. For me it has always been a balance between the Venetians and the Florentines, Romanticism / Classicism, color / form, and painting / drawing. One can’t look at a form divorced from color. It’s a complicated issue for me.
My solution to this problem right now has been to work within the restraint of chromatic grays. And recently I have been drawn to objects composed of grays with parts made of plastics, metals and wires, so the shoe fits. I mostly work with either a warm or cool mixture of red and green with white added in for the shifts in value. That’s what goes on top. The under-painting is a whole other animal. I started using washy glazes of saturated colors as a ground so that the grays on top didn’t feel so dead (Nat Meade used to pick on my paintings in grad school because the grounds were left white, like the Impressionists). My under-paintings are color coordinated, differentiating the layers of spatial depth. Each painting is different but the most common use of the color is as follows:

Yellow = ground
Green = shadow
Red = light

Sometimes I mess with that, with blue, orange, and sometimes purple, just to see how the gray will behave on top. The same color gray will look different on top of a red than it does to a yellow or green, and in that, the same gray becomes a different gray. There are so many variations within these limits I feel like this is merely the starting point for me in my exploration of color. But for now, this is how I am making sense of things.

As far as my practice is concerned…it comes down to discipline again. I know I have to do certain things before I get down to business and waste a lot of material, so I have to come up with plans before I begin a painting. Every big painting starts off as a series of sketches. They can be formal or informal; on bar napkins or paper, whatever is available when I get an idea for a painting. From that point if I want more from that idea I make a small sized gouache painting and start thinking about how to conceive of the image and what to do with the paint. One thing leads to the next and I decide a size appropriate for the scale of the image and go. A lot of the time the larger paintings lead to smaller works as well. One part might strike me as worthy of more time or a separate canvas, so that spills out onto other surfaces. Keeping this part open for exploration helps me maintain an interest in any given subject. The deeper I can go into one thing, the more I can get out of it, the more I figure out, and all the while I am generating more paintings so I don’t feel like I’m wasting time on a big blow out.

Lately I’ve been returning to the image of the window fan I had hung in DeCordova. I wasn’t satisfied with my depiction of it. For a long time I would try and see how something was made, and then sort of internalize that form and make a painting of it. Now I am trying to keep it more true to what I am looking at, more observation and study of the thing itself. I’ve come to be more invested in the work as a result. Now I feel as though I am manufacturing these things. I observe, disassemble, and reassemble the objects. I’m also becoming interested in the situations one might find these objects in. The painting you cited in Yeah You Missed It is that same fan from the DeCordova but in one point perspective and with a window screen on top of it… The painting fools with perception. When you look at this painting you are looking at a small selection of a scene. Looking up from the ground outside an apartment to the second floor window where the fan is. I’ve cropped out everything but the space with the fan in it. Due to the perspective a lot of the object is obscured by the screen in front of it and the painting starts to take on different roles. It’s an illusion of space and it’s flat, like that Modernist thing you described. The tactility of the paint also helps with that. The painting asks a lot of questions at the same time and contradicts itself.

Installation view of Yeah, You Missed It, curated by Robert Moeller, at the Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the arts.
On wall: Palocci’s Looking Up. (Sculpture by Antoniadis and Stone.)

The restraints of this one object lead me to this strange selection of that scene and it is leading to even more. Restraints aren’t really restricting. I feel that restriction can be liberating, as it forces one into focus. It just takes a while to find that focus.

Talk soon,

Tony

monument #10, egg tempera, oil, and collage on wood with acrylic

I have a lot of things to remember.  That is why I started making these monuments.

I didn’t know that they were monuments when I was started, but, like most artists, I don’t immediately know what the subject of the work is when I am making it.  As I continued to make them, it was clear that they are markers, like a sign on the road.  They are indicators, placeholders, something that I recalled and needed to make manifest in a form that would serve as a container for that recollection.

Spaces have a residue.  I work to give that residue a form.  And an expression.

This rendering of form is not the same as recreating a room or building an environment.  It is more about sensation than anything else.  Sensation is a something that painting is dynamically suited to convey.  (Bridget Riley talks about this here.)  I am using touch, timing, color interval, placement and composition to create the sensation of the place, but not the place itself.  I am creating an interior sense of a body in a space without a theatrical recreation of an environment.  In this way, the work contests the sense of spectacle in art and instead posits recollection as the portal into the work.

My work has a direct relationship to lost spaces and lost people.  Rooms are filled with images of people who used to inhabit them. They are sites of memory. My impulse is to make an image for a specific space I wanted to remember, or a place that reoccured to me visually as well as emotionally.  These spaces need a memorial.

I don’t mean solely domestic space and I don’t mean the interior as in psychological, although I think both of those spaces figure into the work. (I came of age as a painter when Gaston Bachelard‘s ideas where going though school like a virus.)

I cut a section of a memory into a shape and mark it with an avatar, a witness.  I want to bring that space into your space, and mark it with light, because it is NOT your space.  I paint them on the back because I want to frame it in the light of memory, the halo of experience, the way you recall something while you are looking at something else.  It glows with recollection.  The corner, the edge, the meeting point, these can be the indicator of an entire environment.  The shift of surface is sometimes a subtle transition and sometimes blunt flex of thought.  It can be a marker of how a room changes, or how the body moves from one space to another.

To work in egg tempera is to embrace a different idea of time.  In a fundamental way, painting contains time.  The surface of a painting records everything.  And for the painter, you know what was there and you know what had to be destroyed in order to make the painting look the way it does.  For the painter, all of those paintings inform the last painting.

Sassetta,
Virgin of Humility
1440s
Panel, 79 x 46 cm
Collezione Vittorio Cini, Venice

The material also contains a sense of devotion.  Applied in strokes, each one drying immediately, and layering color in the most direct way, egg tempera allows me to caress the faces of the witnesses in the paintings over and over again. As Sassetta painted the Virgin, he touched her face over and over again. The act of rendering is an act of devotion.

I started this painting 8 years ago

I finished a painting today.

I had been painting on it for a while. At least 8 years, I think.  I don’t mean I was painting on it every day for 8 years.  I mean from time to time, over that stretch of time, I would take up the picture and try to get it done.  It feels done now, meaning that it succeeds as a picture and it has a life of its own independent of me.  It does something that I did not anticipate and it continues to disarm me as a maker, and to empower me as a viewer.  In a nutshell, that’s how I know it’s done.

I think about what I was doing over the various times I took up the picture.  I was in love when I started it and I thought I finished it then.  In fact, I thought I finished it a number of times.  I’ve had a variety of jobs, lovers, friends, losses, success, and failures over that time.  I think the picture bears the traces of all of it.  Some days I picked up the brush with confidence only to be embarrassed at how badly the picture was coming along.  I would turn it to the wall on these days.  Even looking at the back of the panel, I could see the failed image.

I never really had an idea of what this picture was supposed to be.  It has been a variety of heads over time. It’s been too many colors; the flesh tones have gotten progressively bloodless over the time I painted it.  It’s been sanded a couple of times, by hand and with a power sander.  I had way too much paint on it for a while and the ridges and history of the dried paint sometimes got in the way of the track of the brush.  The dried paint forced me to make the same decisions over and over.  When I sanded some of the paint off, I made an effort to keep the image.  Sometimes I could and sometimes I would just paint over everything and cry.

Perfect nose

Years ago, I cant’t remember how long ago, I saw a man at the Purple Cactus who had a beautiful nose.  When I got back to my car, I drew his face and I had the drawing in my wallet for a while.  I pulled it out the other day and thought about the painting.  I wondered if this was the nose that was supposed to be in the painting.  I tried to put it in and it made me change the entire picture.  It was a worse failure than before.  I wondered if I should just paint the nose and leave the rest of the painting.  Maybe it could just be a painting of a nose?

I was at MacDowell and there was snow.  The greens and the greys mixed in a way that I could only describe as heavy and thick.  I loved the density of the winter color.  For the first time in a long time, I considered painting the landscape.  I would never do that because landscape painting is really fucking hard.  Especially for a control freak like me.

I pulled out this painting yesterday and thought about heavy grey.  I mixed a bunch of color in the memory of the snow.  I looked at my jawline in the mirror and repainted the picture.  It’s not a big painting, about 12 x 16 inches.  It took me a few hours to repaint it.  I used my jaw and I painted over the perfect nose of the man but for some reason, I thought about his hair and I used it.  I invented the cheekbones and followed the line of them to place the eye pits and the line of the skull.

I thought he might be blind.  I painted his eyes and then I thought he might be blinking or winking.  I thought he might not want to see what he was seeing.  I thought his mouth might be a sign of life, bloody, vibrant.  A dead head with a living mouth.  I thought he was somewhere between the lusty and the dead.

His ears were bigger.

I set the painting on my table so it would be the first thing I saw when I came back into the studio and I went home.  When I came in today, that’s when I knew it was finished.  I didn’t want to do anything to it and I was looking at it for a long time.  I was a viewer, I wasn’t a painter then.  That’s how I knew it was done.

I started making a base for it.  It needs to be a free standing painting.

I am thinking about my palette for paintings and I have been doing a lot of walking lately.

Now, I am not the sort of person who has ever been remotely interested in painting the landscape.  Seriously, it was something I did when I was in school but I was never very good at it.  Then I went to Skowhegan and I met amazing painters who were really committed to painting the landscape (like Ellen Altfest, Frank Meuschke,  Lois Dodd, and Yvonne Jacquette) and I knew I didn’t have that kind of commitment in me for the landscape.

I will say that the color in the landscape has become very urgent for me lately.  Specifically, the way green is becoming a situation for color.  I start thinking what it could mean to formulate a painting where varieties of green are the basis for the color relations. So I’ve been walking in the landscape a lot lately and looking at trees. And mixing that color when I get home.

A detail from the glorious “Self-portrait in a Tuxedo” (1927) on view at the Harvard Museums weird ass “greatest hits” installation at the Sackler. Everyone is usually kvelling over his use of black but the joy is the chromatic shadows in the face. You can see this painting and then go look at the Poussin’s upstairs and wonder how people could ever think that making a shadow was a matter of adding black.