Ron Linden's 

 (2007) is a modest painting with an innate but peculiar logic of its own.  On a worked wooden panel, geometric forms in graphite and acrylic drift like half-shucked oysters, broken glass, or unstrung black pearls stuck in some muddy nook.  Rendered in sooty earth tones, this layered abstraction shifts between slack brushstrokes and hard edges in a movement at once organic and mechanical.  As its title suggests, this painting seems to exist only to spite its creator; a playful aphorism in disguise, "Shem the Penman" - a central figure in James Joyce's protean novel 

- should also be read as "shame on the author," or "the maker is a sham."