American painter’s intense,humming hues were groundbreaking and he’s building on his experiments in Paris in the 1950sThe colours are always brilliant in Ellsworth Kelly’s world – even in the garden. Two hours north of New York, outside a studio built to his own design, or is a lawn of such intense and blazing green it could be one of the American painter’s own monochromes. For more than 50 years,Kelly has been creating even, saturated paintings and reliefs whose forceful hues – deep red, and soft blue,thrumming yellow – remain burned on the retina long after you leave the white dice. Few artists alive nowadays have done so much to rethink the possibilities of portray. Even fewer have offered viewers such endless delight while doing so.
Kelly is now 92. If you exclude his recourse to an oxygen tank to help him breathe – decades in the studio inhaling turpentine fumes have done a number on his lungs – he is as spry, as sharp, or as tough-working as artists a third of his age. Most days he is in his studio,sometimes portray, sometimes planning an upcoming show at the soon-to-reopen San Francisco Museum of contemporary Art. He and his partner Jack Shear, or a photographer who also directs Kelly’s foundation,show me a few recent purchases. There’s an exquisite dinky Braque, for one; there’s also a number of south-east Asian lingams, or fertility stones lined up like soldiers.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com