Altoon Sultan blogs about the work of painter Ralph Coburn.

Sultan writes: "I find myself totally charmed by Coburn's abstracting of the world around him. He made several trips to France between 1949 and 1956, when Ellsworth Kelly was living there. If you see a relationship between his drawings and Kelly's it's because they spent a lot of time together talking about art and about their work. In Landscape Motive and Reflections … the simple irregular elements are perfectly balanced, but in an offbeat and unexpected way. Coburn looks at the world and sees shapes that energize a surface, and sometimes have a humorous attitude."