“Seeing how things change as they dry keeps me coming in every morning…I wouldn’t want to learn how to control that. It’s really important to let a painting take on its own direction.”
Ryan Sullivan, 2013

In title, the present lot, September 1, 2009 - February 11, 2010, charts the exact dates of the painting’s progression from a sparse blank canvas to a radiating picture of brilliants peaks and valleys. By continually smearing layers of paint and latex upon the horizontally placed canvas, Sullivan allows the composition to form naturally over time. He explains that is he has “always found the gesture in the hand to be incredibly problematic in painting. ….a big focus of mine was how to remove the hand from painting. I'm guiding the paint but there's no brushwork, there's no signature going on." (Ryan Sullivan in C. Bollen, “Art Ryan Sullivan,” Interview Magazine, 2013) September 1, 2009 - February 11, 2010, records the ripples and cracks of a rough terrain; executed in shadowy black and a burnt orange, the canvas is reminiscent of a fiery, singed, volcanic surface. Sullivan explains that the unpredictability of this stunning visual outcome “is not so theoretical. It's not preordained. I want to take a lot of time to let stuff happen, basically….When you have wet paint and dry paint and layers moving, it's something that I'm responding to." (Ryan Sullivan in C. Bollen, “Art Ryan Sullivan,” Interview Magazine, 2013) The final visual result is one of swelling texture; the applied latex forms an oil paint skin over the canvas that maps the vulnerable evolution of Sullivan’s artistic process.