PROVENANCE
Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York
Collection of Mr. Pyrch, Edmonton
Private Collection

EXPOSITION
Edmonton Art Gallery, Selections from the Pyrch Collection, July - August, 1983

By the end of the 1960s, a young Larry Poons was considered to be a pioneering voice in American Colour Field painting. His earliest works were rhythmic, all-over arrays of “dots,” painted in pulsing colour and arranged into ordered, pre-planned grids. These geometric arrangements had a distinct optical quality, with their dots flickering and vibrating and seeming to float over solid, vibrantly coloured monochrome grounds. These paintings were wildly popular and helped to establish Poons as a crucial figure in the latter generation of New York abstractionists, showing first at Robert Bellamy’s Green Gallery and later with Leo Castelli.

The end of the ’60s saw a gradual shift in Poons’s production, with the rigid matrices of dots breaking out into free-floating, chromatic ellipses, applied in a form of agitated mark-making that he likened to drawing. While these works retained the smooth surfaces and primacy of pure colour that characterized the earlier works, they also demonstrated a willingness to break with expected convention and Poons’s proactive sensibility to radically shift his painting practice.

In the early 1970s, Poons made the most evocative and in many ways permanent break with his earlier colour-field works, moving away from pure colour to focus on texture. Laying his canvases on the floor, he began to pour his paint, building up layers of heavy impasto and embracing the cracks and crevices that emerged from the built-up layers of pigment. It was only when Poons started to prop up his canvases vertically that he approached the apotheosis of his painting. Fastening canvas to the walls of his studio, Poons began to throw paint from buckets, allowing it to run down the canvas and dry in extended drips and splatters. While still likening this process to a quasi-intentional sort of drawing or draughtsmanship, by applying painting in this way Poons allowed elements of chance—as well as the physical force of gravity and the durational effects of time—to impact the final composition.

The results were remarkable. The layers of thrown paint produced richly nuanced, all-over compositions of deep texture as well as a complexity and ambiguity of colour that defied wholly intentional application. Thickly applied skeins of paint, drying as they rolled down the canvas, resulted in a palpable sense of verticality that recalls the monumental strata of a rocky cliff face or the rugged surface fissures of tree bark. Far from the staid solidity of ancient geologies, however, Poons’s surfaces seem alive with movement, flashing and dazzling with a sense of vertical motion that recalls the scintillating optical effects of his earlier dots.

Windmill is an exceptional example of the artist’s works from this period. Modulated monochromes and lavish textures resist settling on a simple grey scale, as whites and greys flow together in a thick cascade of impasto. White dominates the upper register, swinging across the canvas in a roughly perceived diagonal sweep, while the lower half seems to rest in a shadowed overhang of darker greys. Beneath the surface of the darker areas emerges a flush of colour: ochres and siennas that suggest organic blooms of lichen or mineral oxides. The overall effect is arresting, and we get the sense that we have fused a primordial sense of expression with the intentional mark-making of the artist’s hand.

Throughout his long career, Poons would break with his own practice in an attempt to develop his unique pictorial language. Later developments would see him add mixed media elements, building up his surfaces with supporting armatures of paper or rubber foam, while still later he would begin manipulating paint directly on the canvas with his hands and fingers. But it is his “throw” paintings of the 1980s, of which Windmill is an emblematic example, that are among his best and most successful, and which solidify his position as one of the most significant painters of the later twentieth century.

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