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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.” Wearing a brightly coloured parka in the wintery landscape, this anonymous person takes aim with a longbow at some target that is completely obscured for the viewer.

This seemingly simple scene is in fact riddled with mystery. Both the figure and the bow are tightly aligned to grid axes, which squeezes all perspective out of the bow and transforms it into the appearance of a dark vertical blade rising from somewhere near the archer’s heart. The unseen junction of the bow, hands, and target coincides with an uncanny break in the angle of the snowy slope. All this produces an unnatural perspective in the archer but also 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.”