“It’s not just formal for me—color has great depth; it can bring up great emotion and immense feeling.”
—Stanley Whitney
Within the structure of the grid, Stanley Whitney finds endless expressive variations while inventing a visual language that elicits immediate recognition and an overarchingly cohesive oeuvre. Color is the unequivocal leader in all his compositions, and the artist’s Stay Songs monotypes, made during his residency at the Vermont Studio Center, aptly reflect the spirited and multifaceted qualities of color. Whitney’s structure simply acts as the vessel for what the color wants to be, and each time the choice is different. He describes how he initially struggled with his intentions to center color in his work: “For a long time, my difficulty was how to make color the subject because the way we were taught is that color supports content.”i
Whitney traveled to Rome to live and work for a period in the 1990s. Surrounded by its abundance of linear columns and imposing ancient stone structures, he found his compositional style. Yet he further finds a freedom in such structures through his focus on colors presented as undulating rectangles. A colleague and collaborator of Whitney’s, poet Norma Cole writes of his work, “Color becomes its text, its object, scription, not description…Colors seem to know each other in ways words are not able.”ii She also composed a series of five poems inspired by Whitney entitled Stay Songs for Stanley Whitney. The fifth concludes the series below:
There will be
time
then
there will be
song
for the paintings
say
stayiii
The melody in Cole’s poems evokes the swing of music inherently applied through the monotype’s title. Always playing the experimental jazz of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Ornette Coleman in his studio, the interplay of changing colors and varying rectangles reflects the sonal influence of its improvisational rhythm. Just as jazz launches from the bones of a melody and improvises upon it, Whitney begins with the grid, the groundwork of his compositions and lets the colors flow through him. The artist explains, “I start at the top and work down. That gets into call-and-response. One color calls forth another. Color dictates the structure, not the other way round.”iv The grid has been utilized by countless artists throughout art history, notably in the 20th century by Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. Upon his first encounter with Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie in 1968, Whitney was immediately drawn to its illusion of the blues filling the streets of New York City in the 1940s. Its visual tones, though constricted by their palette of red, yellow, and blue, dance on the canvas. Whitney finds a similar liveliness in his restriction of structure by embracing the variability of his colors and letting them sing.
