THE POUR.(The Talk of the Town)(Barnaby Furnas)(Interview)

At five o'clock on a recent Monday afternoon, the artist Barnaby Furnas was in his Brooklyn studio, getting ready to start what he called "the pour" on a very large painting. Twenty-seven feet long by eleven and a half feet wide, propped horizontally on sawhorses of graduated height so that one end was about three feet lower than the other, the canvas virtually filled the room, leaving only a foot or so on either side for Furnas and his two assistants, Sarah Eaves and Jared Preston, to maneuver. The painting, called "Red Sea," had been requested by Marianne Boesky, Furnas's dealer, who hoped it would be the largest work at the Armory Show, the international art fair that opens on March 10th. Like "Apocalypse," an equally vast Furnas painting, which was displayed in the window of Lever House, on Park Avenue, last fall, this one's dominant color would be a dark, visceral red that looked startlingly like blood.

"I think these big blood floods are absolutely timely," said Furnas, whose red hair is several shades lighter than the glass of red wine that he was holding. "For some time, I've been doing battle pictures, and people shooting people, and now this--which is about as clear as I can get. It's about things going wrong, everything collapsing. In a way, that's reassuring, at least in painting, because there are no boundaries, there's no abstraction versus representation--everything can be both." He said this cheerfully, without apocalyptic overtones. Furnas, who is thirty-two, seems to like talking about his work almost as much as he likes making it. "It'll take us about an hour to do the pour," he said. "We'll come back when it dries, in a day or so, and do a couple more pours, and then, once the red is all down, we'll mask it off and do the sky. The whole thing will be done by Thursday."

Furnas and his assistants had already done a lot of work on the canvas. Stretching it and priming it with four coats of gesso had taken a couple of weeks, and the whole middle section, from front to end, was covered with a tracery of meandering, threadlike lines in several shades of indelible ink--green, blue, black, yellow--which would bleed through the washes of red paint as it dried. "We did this today, with hypodermic needles," Furnas explained. "They're quietly selling them in drugstores now. The needles are cheap, but they make this gorgeous line, very rich. I sent Sarah to Duane Reade for them last time, and I also asked her to pick up baby formula for me"--Furnas and his wife, Andrea Rooke-Ley, have a fifteen-month-old daughter--"and they gave her this look, like 'Oh, you poor girl.' "

A young blond woman arrived. It was Marianne Boesky, effervescent with anticipation. She put on disposable white coveralls and prepared to join in the pour.

Furnas started at the high end of the canvas, not pouring but slathering on water-based Mars Black with sweeps of a wide brush. He switched to a dark red, laying it down quickly, and sometimes flinging it out in Pollock-like arcs. Sarah and Jared ...