Rashid Johnson paints with looping, calligraphic strokes, using a pigment stick and sometimes his gloved fingertips to evoke the loose style of graffiti. However, these strokes are regimented into a grid pattern, a compositional device that allows the artist to make expressive variations on a theme. The paint color, “Black and Blue,” was created for his series of “bruise paintings,” of which this is one. Working during the pandemic, Johnson explored being wounded and healing or, as he notes, “what it felt like to be living after a blunt force trauma of some sort.” The hue modulates and changes like a bruise, and might serve as a metaphor for the nonlinear path of mending body and soul in unpredictable times.

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