2016 OFF THE CUFF: COLOUR BLOCKINGANN CLARKE AND GARY MICHAEL DAULT
It was my delight, first of all, with Ann Clarke’s exquisite, painted boxes and boards and, second, my added enjoyment of the proportions and brightness of her white, white studio in the small town of Newburgh, near Kingston, that led us to Colour Blocking.
Clarke’s chromatically authoritative boxes—shards of lyric minimalism—seemed to me to cry out for some further extrapolation of colour onto the gallery walls. What I wanted was to background her boxes with squares of cardboard, each of them painted quickly and roughly but as purely as possible, and to pin them around the gallery in as uncomposed a manner as possible.
Neither Ann Clarke nor I are minimalists or constructivists. But her boxes seemed to awaken in each of us a sort of hunger for pure hue, and a release from the usual encumbrances of nuance, inflection, texture and incident.
Suddenly we wanted to know how much colour weighed, how dense it was, how advanced or recessive it could be. What really happened when colours were juxtaposed? Would they try to spring away from one another like similar poles of a magnet, or would they sidle up together and purr like cats?
Colour Blocking is an attempt to find out.
-----Gary Michael Dault
It was my delight, first of all, with Ann Clarke’s exquisite, painted boxes and boards and, second, my added enjoyment of the proportions and brightness of her white, white studio in the small town of Newburgh, near Kingston, that led us to Colour Blocking.
Clarke’s chromatically authoritative boxes—shards of lyric minimalism—seemed to me to cry out for some further extrapolation of colour onto the gallery walls. What I wanted was to background her boxes with squares of cardboard, each of them painted quickly and roughly but as purely as possible, and to pin them around the gallery in as uncomposed a manner as possible.
Neither Ann Clarke nor I are minimalists or constructivists. But her boxes seemed to awaken in each of us a sort of hunger for pure hue, and a release from the usual encumbrances of nuance, inflection, texture and incident.
Suddenly we wanted to know how much colour weighed, how dense it was, how advanced or recessive it could be. What really happened when colours were juxtaposed? Would they try to spring away from one another like similar poles of a magnet, or would they sidle up together and purr like cats?
Colour Blocking is an attempt to find out.
-----Gary Michael Dault