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"his ever-accumulating practice."
Anyone spending any significant time in struggling art students' studios would recognize these experimental searchings, objects-as-attempts, considered less for what they are than the potential in an artistic career, (i.e. it's not contemporarily gleaming right now but it could be polished later if I chose this object-as-trajectory as my career,) the object as long term possibility. It was Aldrich's decision to accumulate rather than throw the fits, recognizing their stupid interest as potentials, each a tangential to the great whale of capital P Painting. Because there's an artist somewhere that does this full-time, which we were all trying to avoid such jobs. Aldrich's attempts at personally expanding the field of painting attend their comedy-almost by feeling so part-time. Because surely there is actually a fool doing this full time.
See too:
Richard Aldrich at Gladstone Gallery
