Art work by Arron Sturgeon — Untitled, Oil and Wax on Panel

Arron Sturgeon — Untitled, Oil and Wax on Panel

An untitled abstract composition by Los Angeles painter Arron Sturgeon (20th/21st century), worked in oil and wax on a square panel. Signed and titled verso.

Sturgeon's process is closer to excavation than to painting. He builds the surface up, then scrapes, drags, rubs and abrades it back down, so the panel reads at once as a foundation for something unbuilt and the remains of something lost. Here a chalky off-white ground is broken open in ragged, torn-edged passages that expose rust, ochre, mauve and green beneath — the wax lending those buried layers a translucency that shifts with the light. Broad swaths of paint loop and stutter across the panel, colors mixing as they travel, in the manner of Gerhard Richter's dragged surfaces.

Against that turbulence Sturgeon sets hard-edged, flatly painted forms — deep forest green, dense black, a clean emerald crescent — and a faint yellow ruled grid drawn across the white. The geometry doesn't impose order on the chaos so much as propose that the two might coexist. It is a picture that gives up most of its detail at close range: the rewards are in the tactile range of the surface, not the distanced view.

Sturgeon exhibited with William Turner Gallery in Los Angeles, where his oil-and-wax panels were noted in the press for exactly this balance of control and abandon — the painter pulling back just before the texture dissolves. The work belongs to the countercurrent of Southern California abstraction: where the 1960s "finish fetish" school chased slick, pristine, automotive surfaces, Sturgeon's generation went the other way, toward the raw and deliberately unrefined, with roots in the gestural immediacy of Abstract Expressionism.

Unframed, as intended — painted edges are continuous with the composition and the panel is meant to hang unglazed and unadorned.

Details

Artist: Arron Sturgeon (20th/21st Century)
Title: Untitled
Medium: Oil and wax on panel
Signed and titled verso: Arron Sturgeon
Dimensions: 24"W x 24"H
Condition: Excellent. No condition issues. Blacklight examination shows no evidence of restoration.
Provenance: Estate, Pasadena, California; by family descent
Presentation: Unframed