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In 2013 the prospect of a large wall painting commission required a different approach. As Westfall addressed the proposal for a sequence of six soaring twenty-two foot vertical walls he decided to slice and re- proportion segments from recent compositions expanding them to the scale of the architecture. Sometimes he retained compositional anchors at the edge but often and importantly he unmoored the structures in a way that began to imply fields that extend beyond the physical boundar- ies of the format. One of the structures he looked to for the project was a dazzlingly colorful diamond patterned painting. In the process of making one of a still ongoing series of harlequin paintings he noticed that the white space around the diamonds prior to filling them all with color breathed air into the composition. The inclusion of expanses of white created a space that Westfall describes as mentholated and this effect was incorporated in his largest wall paintings to date the forty-five foot long Canterbury cre- ated for Art OMI and Stars and Candy Wrappers which ran a hundred feet around all four walls of the Nachman Gallery in the museum at the Univer- sity of California Santa Barbara. They also commissioned Argus a twenty- five foot work to fill an outdoor wall at the museum. The repercussions of these two new aspects that emerged in the recent wall paintingsthe uncontained compositional field and the aera- tion of the color system along with a new tweak involving a subtly desta- bilizing skew to the picture planecan now be seen in the central group of large new paintings included in the current exhibition. They represent a striking advance in a body of work that is simultaneously intellectual pastoral zen and pop indebted to the likes to Mondrian Matisse John McLaughlin and Stuart Davis yet thoroughly forward-looking and opti- mistically inclined. The paintings in the exhibition demonstrate a certain brand of agile pictorial thinking that has always exemplified the best of Stephen Westfalls work. jill weinberg adams New York 2016