Day 352- "Whirlirama"

July 6, 2023

Gallery 921 displays nine large works. I can’t abide by my “rule” of choosing the most problematic canvas, because if I did, I suspect that my choice,  an abstraction by Clyfford Still (three are hanging side-by-side,  all characterized. by irregular swaths and slashes of paint), would say nothing to me no matter how long I looked at it. But neither will I take the easy way out and select the painting I immediately recognize and gravitate to,  one of Ellsworth Kelly’s “Blue Green Red “ paintings, whose clean lines and rich colors I find endlessly satisfying. 

My choice is instead a 1970 acrylic  on canvas entitled "Whirlirama," by Sam Gilliam,  an artist I’ve never heard of before. Very large in format (perhaps nine feet across and only a little less high), it is composed of vertical streaks in various colors, predominantly teal, turquoise, and red-orange, but also yellows, a fleshy pink. and brown. Giving the painting visual interest are the flecks of white and brown that rise above the plane of the canvas and lend the image a kind of depth. 

The placard describes the way Gilliam made the painting: applying the acrylic paint onto unpainted canvas without using brushes, instead "staining it like a piece of fabric" (but how did he do that, I wonder - a kind of dye bath?), then applying silver and red, then crumpling the support so that the colors would smear and mix, then mounting the canvas on a stretcher,  "reinforcing the physicality of this otherwise ethereal, lyrical painting."  I can almost visualize the process, but a little video showing the artist at work would be helpful - much more than attaching the adjectives "ethereal" and "lyrical." Placard-writers: Please leave such judgments to us viewers! The work reminds me somehow of a multicolored forest scene viewed through a mist; the brown and white shapes could be vines or woodland birds.