Colors Exploding Like Dynamite

[caption id="attachment_769" align="aligncenter" width="512" caption="Ellsworth Kelly, Spectrum I 1953"][/caption]

This is the way I feel about Ellsworth Kelly's paintings. I think many misunderstand his intentions and think that the work is about creating optics vibrating at the edges. I think not, I think he wants the colors to be big and bright and to explode into the viewer's consciousness.

Here's a quote from Tate Etc. from him:

"In the 1960s the Minimalists’ work was considered to be more or less what it is. The painting or sculpture represents itself. I feel that ten years earlier, starting in 1950, I was struggling with exactly the same problem. Colors for a Large Wallconstructed of 64 separate panels becomes a “painting object” that separates the form – the painting – and the ground, which becomes the wall. The edge of one panel next to another panel is not the same as one colour painted next to another colour on a single canvas. When I want to do a painting with one colour overlapping another, it has to be a real overlap, not a depicted overlap. I didn’t want to paint an overlap, meaning that it would be a deception or illusion."

"In Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Fauves – Matisse,Derain – were using bright colours in their full intensity, which continued with Kandinsky, Malevich, Kirchner, Léger and Mondrian. They employed all the colours of the spectrum. In the 1940s and 1950s the majority of the Abstract Expressionists in New York rebelled against this European use of colour and mostly used mixed colours. That is, the Abstract Expressionists did use bright colours sometimes, but they tended to paint wet-on-wet, which muddled their hues. As Matisse would say, a small patch of any one colour is far less intense than a large one of the same colour. I returned in 1954 to New York and showed paintings done in France at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1956 with bright colours that wouldn’t really be used until the Pop artists in the 1960s. My idea of using colour at its full intensity, which began with Colors for a Large Wall, hasn’t changed in the 60 years that I’ve been painting."