The Art of Raymond Saunders: Colored

Raymond Saunders… has always revered the sometimes beautiful/always honest aspects of street art, doodles, scrawls, and other fringe drawing reflexes. Cy Twombly, Raymond Saunders’s half-brother in creating painted homages to visual automatism, shares Saunders’s early appreciation for the gesture in art, and joins him in providing viewers with an American spin on European tachisme…The difference, of course, is that Saunders’s marks grow out of visions unique to him and him alone. Saunders’s scratches have evolved over years of “remembering to remember” discarded passports, sidewalk sketches, children’s blackboards, artist’s plans, etc… Saunders, somewhat like jazz great Miles Davis, takes these marginal notes, lines, and/or phrases from the world-at-large, and reconstitutes them into nothing short of major artistic statements.