Joe Vinson

Artist’s Statement

Many of the abstract paintings that I make are intended to answer some questions that I have regarding some aspect of painting or as a proof of an idea.

This painting’s genesis stems from a series of paintings that I made emphasizing value contrasts. My interest in this subject arose as a direct result of exposure to ideas of color field painting in my studies with Friedel Dzubas at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Traditional western paintings with their chiaroscuro, shadowing, modeling etc., are constructed by using contrasting values or the degree of lightness and darkness. Also the tradition of working from a dark ground and putting the light value paint on the top layer conditions the painting toward an emphasis on value. A change occurred in the later part of the 19th century, beginning perhaps with the more transparent paintings of Turner and continuing with the lighter palettes of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and the strong color contrasts of the Fauves. With the lightening of the paintings, greater emphasis of color hue changes were used to structure the images. One way of insuring that the emphasis was on color and not on value was to tune your colors by making them a closer value range. One can see this in the purely abstract paintings of Phillip Guston of the early 1950’s, these are the so-called abstract impressionist paintings. Certain critics decried Guston’s evolution to his next paintings which brought black back into the picture as an assault on the color purity of the work. At some point it seemed that using a wide range of value just wasn’t done, and a new academic practice was born.

I like value contrasts in paintings; I think that value is an inherent aspect of color. Squeeze out a dollop of ultramarine next to a cadmium yellow and you will see what I mean. Value contrast brings a rich and expressive power to paintings that they would lack if subjected to the restriction of only a single value. So as I was making this group of paintings constructed of wide value contrasts I made some adjustments in technique that raised the question. Would it be possible to make a painting with a range of values and still be about color? By using a palette knife and applying the paint as a single stroke, the paint was not being modeled. Each shape was a distinct color and value. There is no shading or modeling or changes of value within each shape. Each shape is also mixed to make a color contrast with the adjacent shapes. The palette knife is an excellent tool to use for emphasizing the color of the pigment in the paint, because the knife blade flattens the paint resulting in the smooth surface that reflects the color back to the viewer without the glare of a surface painted with a bristle brush. In some regards this begins to look like a mosaic which has a similarity in the use of discrete pieces or shapes making the whole. However, the use of the paint with the knife shows off its malleability and sensuous tactility which can only be achieved though paint. In this way it is my opinion that this is a painting about color, but about two aspects of color: hue and value.