Donald Moffett | Lot 021417 (the hard spore, aubergine), 2017

Hi, my name is Bill Arning and I have worked as a curator and museum director for four decades now. When I was a museum director here in Houston, we did Donald Moffett's major retrospective. My involvement with Donald Moffett's work goes back to when I ran an alternative space in New York. It was the period when AIDS activism was dominant in the Ark world and we did a show with Act Up and I got to know Donald then he was one of the foremost activist artists making very pointed work with photography and text and created some of the most memorable graphics. There was a period when he reinvented himself and he started looking at what paint could do and he knew that this was going to be a challenge for people who had followed his work for quite a while. He made paint do things it didn't want to do. He started using pastry materials to get paint to stand up like frosting on a cake. So, the period of Donald exploring abstract painting is longer than the period of his activist work and it was a necessary reinvention period because he needed things that were beautiful and could tend to his own soul. What's interesting is with a painting like the one in front of us here, is politics and social concern have reemerged in very different ways. He is now looking at nature and the crisis of existential proportion of what we've done to the environment and how nature is responding. The forms here are from growth diagrams, the reflective surface sees us within a blue miasma considering the Blues of New York series where he photographed the sky, we understand that we are seeing ourselves in a larger environmental tableau. And the beauty of the world, the beauty of nature, the beauty of growth patterns that are all reflected in this piece, which are now threatened by human activity and governmental inaction on the environment, are here woven through with an appreciation of the beauty of the natural world itself.