Ellsworth Kelly

~~I liked Kandinsky...
but I always wanted to make things out of what I saw. ~~


...work operating from its very beginning as a model of dialectical perceptual experience...dialectics of structure and chaos, of chance and control, of colour and space both unlimited and extremely confined. (Benjamin Buchloh, Ellsworth Kelly: Matrix, 2003)

1954: Drawings on a Bus, Sketchbook 23

Kelly sees shadow, not as aspect of its cause, the object from which it issues, but as an independent shape in tension with the surface on which it occurs.

Drawing Center NYC, Ellsworth Kelly, Tablet 1949-73
exhibition 2002

Kelly's four strategies for making art:

transfer

chance

modular grid

monochrome panel

Kelly's work has the charm of irregularity, awkwardness and waywardness.

(Glover, 2010)

Brushstrokes Cut into 49 Squares and Arranged by Chance, 1951
cut and pasted paper and ink
MoMA collection

Study for Rebound, 1951, ink and pencil on paper
MoMA collection

Kelly's work is about tension, constriction, pressure.

The lateral expansion and compression of energies and forces is one of several tension themes...developed . (Goossen, 1973)

There is no trickery, just repeated attempts to establish how a form establishes an identity for itself within a confined space. (Glover, 2010)

Study for La Combe II, 1950
ink and pencil on paper
MoMA collection

Kelly uses shadows as separate entities.  He adapts the Romanesque aesthetic of compact massiveness and the Byzantine aesthetic of general frontality and flatness. He constructs and deconstructs the visible.

He draws inspiration from patterns in shadows and stains, from changes of colour and texture from one material to the next, from the openings in doorways and windows. He studies the collage flatness of Picasso, Jean (Hans) Arp and Robert Motherwell.  He sees the possibility to abstract the accidental juxtapositions and relationships that can develop when drawings are cut up and pasted on another sheet of paper and arranged by chance.

In the world of the young, everything is coming at you all the time.  Whap. Zing. Clonk.  By comparison, Kelly seems to be moving at walking pace, as if plucking berries, one by one, from a bush.  (Glover, 2010)