This mixed media work on paper is one of numerous small-scale works, along with 8 medium-scale paintings on linen, that Cantrick produced for her 2012 series based on the prose poem "The Pebble" by French modernist poet Francis Ponge.
The parallel between the poem and the paintings has to do with the physical disintegration of an aggregate and its consequences for the integrity of the disintegrated object.
The largest of the paintings, a diptych that evolved from a photo taken from a window in the artist’s studio, served as a matrix/aggregate that Cantrick digitally deconstructed and reconstructed into studies for the paintings and small-scale works.
The matrix and 28 of the small works (including Boston pebble 21) were exhibited at the Boston French Cultural Center in 2013.
Susan Cantrick is an American abstract painter whose primary interest is in painting as a structured visual response to sub-linguistic thinking. Her paintings are analogs of her pre-verbal perception that aim to be as articulate as possible, crystallizing the vitality and complexity of emergent cognition.
She lives and works in Paris, France