Sherman is the strangest painter I know. I find his process utterly perplexing. I respect it completely.

Today I began to think that Sherman cares infinitely about his painting, but he cares very very little about you (and me)… those of us looking.

I think the paintings are so good to be with, because they don’t play soppy. We know that there are weeks, months and years between painting sessions in the making of these. That protracted address ruptures the continuity of the surface. We can weave together the brush-pulls, dribbles and stains by looking. But the colour areas stay unmixed. Glazes tint previous applications, but there’s no wet-in-wet blends - no bravura display of dancing touches, wipes, revisions and finessing nuances. Here the dust seems to settle onto the crust of the previous colour (it does feel like only one colour is squeezed onto the palette each session) before the brush is next taken up. Looking at these it is possible to begin to feel that aching gulf of non-action. That is what I mean by the ‘caring very little about you’ bit.

And yet, because of Sherman’s commitment to his own pace, eventually the paintings achieve a kind of tentatively established togetherness. Great passages of studio time don’t lead to over filling or to over emphasis in the way the paintings unite. Painting marks (sessions) weave or echo or charge each other, but they leave loose ends and expectant gaps in there too. These gaps are not the ‘great pause’ whereby distant, future marks may in fact complete the works, although those future possibilities for marks do ghost a trace, an anticipation, which is as active as the clusters and arrays of marks that have thus far arrived. The paintings are thick and thin coloured brush-pulls, spatters, glazes and stains. But they are also gaps and holes and windows of time. And they are all possible futures too.

There’s a kind of meanness in the way that Sherman paints, but because of that, he makes paintings which knock and scratch and tease and delight in a sustained way that many of the ubiquitous amuse-bouche pictures cannot even hope for.