October Ireland by James Edward Scherbarth

A red cap over a purple column, cut with scissors and confidence.

October Ireland is a work on paper by James Edward Scherbarth (1949-2021), dated 2019, and signed, titled and dated 2019 en verso. Scherbarth was an abstract painter whose small works on paper often distill a place or season into a few blocks of color. Here a coral-red shape with one rounded corner sits like a lintel over a tapering slab of plum, separated by a thin white gap. Faint scratched lines run through both colors. The rest of the sheet is left white. It is 7.25 inches wide and 11 high.

October, it seems, is mostly weather and stone.