There’s this question surrounding representational work, which is the area in which Black Arts or that kind of work seems trapped in the minds of a lot of people. And the question concerns the idea that in order for the artist to become truly aesthetic, and be an individual artist as opposed to somebody attached to a group, then the work has to become abstract, which means you have to jettison the representational imagery for some other approach to an idea that doesn’t bear the burden of representation that the black figure tends to carry. | And so the figures in these pictures are represented in a space where they are sort of between abstraction and representation. The palette each figure is holding represents a way in which abstraction is incidental. The palette exists as a kind of an abstract painting. The figure stands behind the palette as a kind of a representational image. And then on the wall behind the figure is the aftermath of the painting process, in which you work on the wall and at the edges of the canvas you end up with this sort of linear abstraction as a residue. So now there’s two different ways in which this kind of abstraction occurs. In both instances it occurs as a part of a process of making work, and it occurs as a part of a process of making representational work as well as a process of making abstract work. So you can be incidentally abstract — and that doesn’t make it less attractive or less profound — or you can be intentionally abstract. And then the figure itself is a stylized figure, so it’s another kind of an abstraction, even though it’s a representational image. [Kerry James Marshall]