James Kalm visits the exhibition Joshua Aster: Little Conversations at Sam Lee Gallery in Los Angeles, on view through October 6, 2012.

The gallery notes that Aster's "works, measuring no more than 24×24 inches each, are intimate in scale and elemental in their emphasis on straightforward mark making. Aster employs ordinary objects such as wood off-cuts, erector set parts, broken plates, and picture frames found in his studio and intuitively arranges them on the canvas. He then traces their outlines and finishes the work by coloring in between the lines with oil paint, thus creating a familiar yet fresh pattern…"