“I’m a painter,” Carolee Schneemann once said. “I’m still a painter and I will die a painter.” Right up until her death in 2019, the artist insisted on the centrality of painting to her wide-ranging and profuse body of work. Across six decades’ worth of performance, film, photography, drawing, sculpture, installation, artist’s books––and, yes, some painting––she always maintained that the eye and hand of Schneemann the painter could be discerned: in her work’s intimate tactility, in its attentive treatment of color and form, and often also in the literal presence of paints or painterly apparatus.

An angry red pimple hums with volcanic intensity on the back of a pale, redheaded figure in Andrew Cranston’s otherwise serene painting Why can’t I be you? (all works 2022). The subject, who lies facedown on a white rug (rendered in fat feathery splotches) on a whitewashed wooden floor, wears only boxer shorts and has skin so pale that it glows green. This soft overall palette of washed-out tones only calls more attention to the zit, which is the swollen, pus-filled kind that you can find being popped and lanced on specialist YouTube videos. (In Scotland, where Cranston lives, they are called