Brushiness

Their ceramic tiles have a distinct "brushiness" that shows the random pattern of brushstrokes used to apply the glazes; the two also produce handpressed relief tiles with an Arts and Crafts bent, as well as whimsical hand-carved tiles depicting farm animals like cows and sheep.

Richter gave up Art Informel in 1962, just as Warhol dropped Abstract Expressionist brushiness in favor of the uninflected sharpness and clarity of his Pop images.

The allusions in "Paintings of Buildings," James's latest show at Sikkema, Jenkins & Co., were less patent but still unmissable: He nods to Andre Derain's orderly delimitations of color in House and Tree, 2007, to Raoul Dufy's rainbow brushiness in Shed, 2007, to Paul Klee's pictographic denotation in House, 2007.

The energetic brushiness with which the leaves are painted in seems a translation into a different visual language of the brushiness with which the animal's coat is painted: Both are in burnt sienna and gold.

There are other paintings, like Flaming Lava, which is almost all scraped- or brushed-on pigment, with a lovely passage in which some coral strokes play against an ocher form endeavoring to become a definite oblong; and still others, like Cathedral, where rectangles abut one another like tectonic plates and where there is very little of the swinging brushiness, everything seeming heavily regimented, vertical and horizontal.

This meant, in effect, a deliberate suppression of the accidentalities of the flowing brush-of what we respond to as the brushiness of the brush.