Speed of Life

by Gregg Chadwick Helen Frankenthaler Mountains and Sea 7' 2 5/8" x 9' 9 1/4" oil on canvas 1952 National Gallery of Art, Washington DC "Fashion and money, fame and power politics have played a part in all art worlds. You've just got to plug away....  I see a revival of the meaning of the word "quality"---a search for truth and beauty in lieu of stock certificates. People are most interested in what's real, what endures." - Helen Frankenthaler (From a Conversation With Lee Rosenbaum ) Helen Frankenthaler's painting  Mountains and Sea opened a painterly universe. She poured, dripped, and floated thinned oil paint directly onto an unprimed canvas, creating a stained surface in which the pigment spread into and throughout the canvas fibers. The painting is mesmerizing, like the open sea is mesmerizing. Color beckons almost like song. As viewers we take the role of Odysseus, some will remain tied to a mast - fighting the beauty and...

Kenneth Noland (1924 -2010) Spread 117" x 117" oil on canvas 1958 Gift of William S. Rubin, Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection. © Kenneth Noland / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY From the exhibition “New York Cool” held at the Museum of Art, Brunswick photo by Tommy Wilcox for The Bowdoin Orient "Mr. Noland’s signature motif was a radiant target made of rings of pure color strained directly on raw canvas, with that canvas contributing a wonderful sense of breathing room between each band of color. The power of the colors, their often discordant interaction and the expanding and contracting rhythms of the bands of paint and the raw canvas, could be stunningly direct and vibrant." - Roberta Smith on Kenneth Noland. "But beautiful ideas are rarely entirely wrong, and something close to Lorentz’s idea is embodied in modern QCD. Quarks carry color charge, and generate color electric fields analogous to the ordinary electric fields around electrons....