“For me, these paintings are meditations on nature. The nature of paint. The nature of color. The nature of landscape. The nature of a single gesture. The nature of nature. Of time. I also want to make paintings that take the viewer and me to a new thought of a new way of seeing what may have already been felt but not formulated.”
- Pat Steir

In Pat Steir’s Elective Affinity Waterfall, rivulets of blue and yellow paint cascade, flick and splatter across the vast expanse of the red canvas. Painted in 1992, just a year before the artist's participation in the 45th Venice Biennale, this work is one of the largest of Steir's extraordinary waterfall paintings from the late 1980s and 1990s that garnered her widespread critical acclaim. Titled Elective Affinity Waterfall in reference to J.W. Goethe’s eponymous novel and his theory of color more generally, it is among the first waterfall paintings that saw Steir embrace the primary colors of red, yellow and blue after limiting herself to a monochrome palette in the four years prior. As with Yellow and Blue One-Stroke Waterfall, 1992, which resides in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, this painting celebrates the expressive power of color - its visceral impact palpable as it captivates the viewer with a similar sense of the sublime when experiencing an epic waterfall in nature.

Steir’s waterfall paintings represent the culmination of her earlier conceptual practice, which probed the history and materiality of painting through distinct bodies of work that formally quoted such predecessors as Northern Renaissance master Pieter Brueghel the Elder or Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. While critical of the term “postmodernism", Steir’s art historical dialogue with the past was part of the same broader revisionist impulse that would later drive the work of artists from the Pictures Generation. As Steir, who was a generation younger than Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock or Barnett Newman, explained of these works, “These paintings are in a sense a comment on the New York School, a dialogue and a wink. They say ‘You didn’t go far enough. You stopped when you saw abstraction. You didn’t see the full circle.’…I've taken the drip and tried to do something with it that Modernists denied. The Image” (Pat Steir, quoted in Brooks Adams, Pat Steir: Elective Affinities, exh. cat., Robert Miller Gallery, New York, 1992, n.p.).

Connecting abstract painting with Asian traditions, particularly 17th century Chinese landscape painting, Steir developed a distinct technique that exploits the figurative potential of abstraction. While Steir initially explored the chance potential of gravity by applying a paint-filled brush against a wall-hung canvas, Elective Affinity Waterfall demonstrates how her conceptual painting technique as of 1989 also embraced splashing paint directly against the canvas. In reference to the Chinese and Japanese “flung-ink style”, Steir creates the middle area of the canvas by flicking or flinging paint from the end of the brush. While Steir determines the color and the flow by varying degrees of dilution, she does not mix them - allowing them instead to produce a range of secondary colors as they meet on the canvas and cohere to the effect of a waterfall.

Elective Affinity Waterfall is not merely meant to be a painting of a waterfall, but be a waterfall. Waterfalls symbolize eternal beginnings and endings in Chinese art and here, too, come to stand as meditations on the flow of time. Transcending the intellectual and the pur-ported binary between representation and abstraction, this painting invites us to reconsider new ways of thinking, feeling and seeing.