Green by Gold 金色と緑色

Morris Louis, who created this work, was based in Washington, D.C., and he visited Helen Frankenthaler in 1953 at her studio in New York and saw her works employing the technique of staining. That visit inspired his subsequent works in the "Veil" series, produced by folding the unsized canvas to create furrows and flowing thinly diluted and almost transparent acrylic paint over it. This work is a mature specimen from the series. The colors used are, as are recognizable at the top, green, orange, pink, yellow and others, and they flow in bands that overlap one another as they run downward, The dark brown which covers the whole picture changes subtly on them, lighter in some parts and darker in others, which creates the details together with the surface texture of paint which has dried irregularly. The layers of paint do not pile up upon the canvas, but seep into it and become the canvas itself. Yet the semitransparent veils of overlapping colors allow the color below to show through, and give spatial depth to the picture.