Private Practice, 1991

40-color serigraph, edition 165/185, 26 ½ × 38 ¼ in. (67.5 × 97 cm)

Gift from a private collection

In an essay accompanying Black’s 1995 exhibition “Fiery Vision Bright” at Regent College, Laurel Gasque identified the uniqueness of Private Practice in this artist’s early work: “Out of a decade of complete absence of the human figure in his painting, as if from nowhere, a bold figure appears unaccountably and unavoidably at the immediate foreground of the picture plane.” 

“. . . [A] person in a scarlet parka, dramatically set off by a white wintry landscape, powerfully pulls back and takes steady aim with a longbow at some target, presumably in the distance, that is completely obscured for the viewer because the back of the figure dominates and totally blocks out access to the line of sight in front of the figure. Inseparably sealed to the landscape in its forward gaze, the figure forms a potent surrogate for the subjectivity of both the artist and the audience to identify with. The hope of this painting lies literally in the openness of its horizon and the piercing point the top of the bow makes vertically into the realm above.” 

This portrayal of a seemingly common scene thus becomes highly enigmatic. The figure and the bow are tightly aligned to grid axes. All perspective is squeezed out of the bow, so that it becomes a vertical line rising from the location of the archer’s heart. This produces an unnatural perspective in the archer, but it thereby transforms the image into something more than pictorial. 

As the artist says, “I hope to disturb, but not alienate, like setting birds to flight in the imagination. Throw a rock at some pigeons on the ground and they’ll take off, swooping and winding and diving. . . When birds take flight, we really know what they’re all about.”