Perhaps you were able to see this museum exhibition when it was at the Denver Museum of Art this fall? “Color as Field” will be on exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, in Washington,DC from now until May 26th, 2008 and then it will travel on to the Frist Center for Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee.
”The exhibition includes 40 beautiful and impressively scaled paintings by such major figures as Gene Davis, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski. Color as Field presents a remarkable opportunity for viewers to fully comprehend the aims of these artists, view their finest works in close relation to each other and experience the beauty and visual magnetism of their pictorial handling of space and color. “
I still remember the first Color field show that I saw at the Corcoran Museum of Art in the early seventies, it was the first time that I was able to see the work of Gene Davis and the work of other painters of the Washington School of color field painters.
My sister remarked that she really liked one of the stripe paintings that was composed of several very long and narrow stretched canvases perched against the wall…and silly me = armed with seven 6″x 2″ planks, a staple gun, a couple of yards of canvas, several rolls of masking tape and Liquitex’s new range of Studio acrylic colors, I made her a color installation as a house warming gift. I liked the effect, she liked the gift and what remains is the memory of just how tricky it can be to even try to make a successful color stripe painting, albeit copied from a master of color stripes. Somehow, experimenting with polymer clay stripes over thirty years later is a lot easier.
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