James Kalm visits the exhibition Michael Berryhill: Incidental Western at Kansas Gallery, New York, on view through June 23, 2012.

Kalm notes that "Constructing his pictures from a mélange of early Modernist and Metaphysical styles representing the nescient phase of Surrealism, Berryhill scrapes and overworks the pictures until the have the luster of scrimshaw. Imagery is a tangle of representational forms verging into abstraction and back again, and a love of the painter's craft, a melodically high keyed palette, and the history of painting is evident."