Julia Couzens reviews Clem Crosby: Short Ride in a Fast Machine at George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco, on view through October 4, 2014.

Couzens writes: "These modestly scaled, loose-limbed paintings create elegant, seemingly effortless tablets of paint tracks, trails, blots, and drools. It is not possible to encounter Crosby’s work without thinking about the physical tasks of painting, such as achieving a perfect symbiosis between surface and pigment, measuring how much or how little paint to load on the brush and how lightly or firmly to grip its handle. These are seemingly simple tasks, but the extent to which the artist is sensitive to these calibrations in part determines the quality of an experience that only painting can provide. For the painter these ostensibly miniscule, even insignificant tasks, can be teeth-clenching, breath-holding exercises in perfect attention to the moment. The apparent off-hand ease in Crosby’s looping entanglements of line shows his acute intelligence, skill and rigor as a painter."