Stanley Whitney / SunRa / 2006 / oil on linen / 40 x 40 in.(cm. 102 x 102) / © Stanley Whitney. Courtesy of Stanley Whitney and Esso Gallery
Thanks to Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes for directing me to Stanley Whitney’s work. Having been inspired by the Color Charts exhibition at MoMA, I’ve been in the studio experimenting with the color exercises of Joseph Albers
John Yau in the Brooklyn Rail has a good review of an exhibition of Whitney’s paintings back in 2006. While he focuses mostly on composition and the rhythmatic effect of the juxtaposition of colors, I am curious to see the surface and how the colors are applied. Are the colors opaque, transparent, layered, mixed, pure, etc. Also, with the Albers exercises, I have been studying the light quality of colors and how the character of the color and the light of the color is changed by juxtapositions. Color is light and color is relative. As Hans Hofmann states, “Color in itself is light. In nature, light creates the color; in the picture, color creates light. Every color shade emanates a very characteristic light–no substitute is possible.” I am interested to see character of the light in Whitney’s paintings. How the colors interact, how each color is changed by its neighbors, and finally how the fit together as a whole the color effect of the whole piece.
Excerpt from John Yau’s review,
Whitney works out of a tradition that includes Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, and Alma Thomas. He is a fiercely independent painter who makes no attempt to charm or impress the viewer, and in that regard is the peer of Bill Jensen and Harriet Korman, self-determined abstract artists who have never been swayed by fashion.[Read more…]
Thank you for this post Gordon. Your insights into painting are a daily fix for me. Colour juxtopositions are a puzzle, problems to be solved. Infuriatingly delicious. Don’t you think?
Hi Inga,
I was reading an essay by Hans Hofmann called “The Color Problem in Pure Painting-Its Creative Origin” and there is a passage there you might enjoy…
“Continuity of color development is achieved through successful, successive development of the color scales. These are comparable to the tone scales in music. The can be played in major or in minor. Each color scale follows again a rhythm entirely its own. The rhythmic development of the red scale differs from that of the blue scale or the yellow scale, etc. The development of the color scales spreads over the whole picture surface, and its orientation, in relation to the picture surface, is of utmost importance.”
What I like about Whitney’s work is how he has interwoven all the colors, so that each color both relates to its neighbor and to the picture as a whole. The beauty of it, and I think the quality that makes it a painting is that they are felt relationships. They can’t be explained. There isn’t a theory about why these colors go together in this relationship. I would hesitate to call it a puzzle in that with a puzzle there is only one possibility. But here, with color there are infinite possibilities. It’s like jazz improve. The wide variety of just Whitney’s work for me is testament to that idea. While I don’t know much about Whitney’s work or his process, I have a strong sense of his intuitive sense of color. His capacity to feel and communicate in color.
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Yes. Good point re ‘puzzle’. Well put.
That’s just my experience. It could be that when you are in the process of painting it does feel like a puzzle. That at the point in time, working on that particular piece or composition, there is only one possibility and the challenge is to find that one color that works. In fact I was looking at a painting in the studio last night and trying to solve a color/composition problem. I look at the painting and there are some interesting things happening but on the whole I feel dissatisfied. I have any idea of why it is not working, but I haven’t found the solution yet. I’m stuggling to find what color fits me and what I want and the color that fits the piece and what is happening on the surface.
I’d kind of like to have it both ways. Lot’s of possibilities and lots of solutions that work. But instead there are lot’s of possibilities and not a lot of solutions that will work.