The subject of colour – Glass talks to New York artist Stanley Whitney who only has one concern

The subject of colour – Glass talks to New York artist Stanley Whitney who only has one concern

Stanley Whitney’s work leaps out at you, sings even, with its combined influences of African roots and contemporary abstraction. But the New York artist only has one concern – the subject of colour

Stanley Whitney’s work is undeniably appealing to the eye. The multi-hued wedges painted in his signature, not-quite-gridded, style are even more captivating in person and have ensured his ascension as one of New York’s most revered contemporary abstract painters. But what is it about these colourful yet intangible paintings that makes them so fascinating, on a page, and in theory?

Colour as a physical artistic focus goes beyond the realm of abstraction. Vincent van Gogh would exaggerate shades of the sky, the chair, his bed, making them seem more than lifelike. Mark Rothko disliked being called an “abstract” painter, claiming that his still enormously successful two-tone paintings expressed basic human emotions such as doom or ecstasy. Ad Reinhardt’s “black” paintings in the 1960s questioned whether “art as art” could ever reach absolution. Josef Albers and the Bauhaus often used colour in terms of deception – Damien Hirst’s spot paintings used it more in terms of branding. Painting without colour would obviously not exist. Human feeling without colour is another issue altogether.

The Subject of Colour Stanley Whitney

Stanley Whitney himself, aged 64, is full of life. He speaks with an urgency that veers on repetition. He understands why major painting exhibitions in the US do not include “paintings that don’t have storylines”, because, he says, people don’t really know how to talk about them. He finds it curious that so many young people were at his latest show at the Team Gallery in New York, and tentatively puts it down to the fact that “it’s what they aren’t getting elsewhere”.

Whitney started painting at a very young age. After moving from his birthplace of Philadelphia he studied art and design in Ohio and Kansas before settling in New York in 1968. Though he was clearly influenced by the New York art movements at the time – one of which was the Colour Field, started by painters such as Josef Albers and Joan Miro and later included African American painters such as Peter Bradley – he felt like he didn’t quite belong. He wanted to reinvent painting without necessarily being part of a scene that he saw as too structured, too Pop.

A lot was projected onto him at the time as an African-American painter, and it wasn’t until the early 1980s that his work started gaining recognition for itself. “It was a long road to painting the grids,” he says. “One painting led to another, and to another. If someone told me 30 years ago that I would have been painting blocks of colour then I wouldn’t have believed them.”

Whitney insists that his work essentially communicates relationships: the relationship of some colours to others. But he could also be referring to the relationship between the artist and his canvas, the canvas to a world view, and that world view to its audience. Everything is there for the taking, and it is difficult to keep your mind’s eye in any one place when appreciating Whitney’s distinctly individual practice, which can be viewed like fabric, or a drawing – even lines on a page.

The tension in his work, full of loaded blocks that seep to the edges, is created by a “call and response” methodology. “I can put down a red, which can then call a blue, then that blue might call a yellow,” he says. “Colour can’t be controlled, so I can’t really tell what the painting will end up looking like. I don’t know what the order will be. The colour has to go wherever it needs to go. That’s the exciting part of it, to discover what happens.”

“Colours have a rhythm and sound,” he says. “They have great depth and feeling… I wanted to feel them. We know that there are ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ colours, but it’s also more emotional, like, polyrhythmic. You can’t focus on any one thing. Everything is equal. No one colour outbalances another, so the viewer has total freedom to see the work in any way they want. The paintings constantly change, they are like paintings in paintings.”

His history as an African American is still relevant as a context, even though the work is almost completely devoid of any external allusions. In what can seem contradictory to his resolve against ideals, he wants history and politics to act as a “driving force” behind his paintings. “I try to make the paintings kind of important, vital,” he says, somewhat elusively. “I really think about what things touch people in a definite or serious way.”

The titles of his artworks often refer to music and poetry (Sugar Hill, Great Balls of Fire), and he has previously spoken about the influence of heavy West African drum beats on his work. Music is “key to our history”, he says. It’s this kind of magic that can be read in his paintings. “If you described one of these paintings, then people would know exactly what it is,” he explains. “But then when you see it, you’d think you never saw it before.”

“The work doesn’t have ideas, they’re not literal,” he adds. “They’re something to really look at and experience. I want it to be like looking at a window. There is a lot of travelling through the paintings, but I want it to be easy to see, easy for the viewer to get involved.” Even without an explanation on a gallery wall, or even reproductions in a magazine, Stanley Whitney’s work can ultimately speak for itself, in that, it is not him saying anything the viewer does not already feel. The human fascination with and appreciation of colour reflects its endless possibilities, and this is something the artist has harnessed with a drama of his own.

by Syma Tariq


Courtesy of the artist and Team Gallery, New York

Taken from the Glass Archive – Issue Three – Promise

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