Although having much variety of style and theme, it was a group of artists in the 1960s whose commonalities were residence in Washington DC, working together at the Washington Workshop, and exploring de-personalized optical color pattern effects through acrylics that could be applied directly to un-sized, unprimed canvas. painters were Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Paul Reed, Thomas Downing and Howard Mehring, and they were first identified as a group in their single exhibition together, which was at the Washington DC Gallery of Modern Art in 1965. Louis and Noland were the first ones to experiment with acrylics, having seen acrylic paintings by Helen Frankenthaler in 1952 where she had poured paint onto canvas. Morris Louis thinned acrylics and played with the effects of pouring it onto canvas and then tilting the canvas to let the paint flow in a variety of directions and create overlapping areas and contrasting bare spots. Kenneth Noland did hard-edged, repetitive patterns such as chevrons, and Gene Davis did thin vertical stripes. In 2007, "Color School Remix" exhibitions were held in several museums in DC to re-visit the paintings of Washington Color Painters

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Gouache Paintings by Paul Reed

The gouache paintings are from 9x12 inches up to 3x8 feet. It was a process that ended up spraying ink on a 4x5 sheet of plexiglas and scraping what would be the white areas of the paper and then printing by hand, offsetting the ink onto the paper. These are what I call the gouache paintings. Opaque watercolor, they are done with block printing, water printing, and water-based silk screening. A very extended series is going up to 1994 using multiple sheets in order to get the scale.



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