Dan Walsh: The Process of Painting

Dan Walsh makes a painting: a fascinating account of the acclaimed abstract painter’s process

With this publication, New York–based painter, printmaker, bookmaker and sculptor Dan Walsh (born 1960) allows the reader to enter his studio and follow his idiosyncratic artistic process. By showing different stages of painting—until the very final one—of a group of 12 recent works (2019–22), he offers a way to understand how a painting is built, how colors and forms merge together, how photography is a precious tool for painterly thinking and how composition and structure are organic processes, even if the result in his case is fundamentally geometrical and grid-based. In his essay, critic and curator Bob Nickas traces the genealogy of such unveiling of the painting process from de Kooning to the present and analyzes in depth Walsh’s specific way of making a painting.