Color field painting is maybe the
most abstract of Modern Art subgenres.
Richard Diebenkorn adopted this style after first practicing on aerial
landscape paintings during his early artistic career. Inasmuch as the American farmland
countryside, viewed from the air, appears in some areas to be blocks or squares
of earth placed along the ground like a puzzle, so the artist viewed painting
as the application of certain colors, in varying shapes or geometric
"blocks," onto a canvas. Have
not all the paintings we've looked at so far been merely "fields" of
colors spread over a flat surface?
Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series (this is No. 28) offers viewers only that
and nothing more. All specifically
chosen and placed in deliberate formation, these colors make up an abstract
creation that challenges even Abstract Art because it challenges the very
makeup of a painting. The colors here do
not form shapes, like in Kandinsky's artwork; here, the colors are the shapes.
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