Black-Green from the Series of Ten Lithographs 1970

Ellsworth Kelly made this lithograph, Black-Green, as part of a series of ten, using a printmaking press and ink on paper. Imagine him, a real cool cat, deciding on these two blocks of colour, setting them up in this specific relationship. I can feel him playing with the simple shapes, getting this pure colour, and trying to get that edge between the shapes just right. It's not about depth here, but maybe it's about surface, and about the flatness of the colour. I wonder if he's thinking about landscape, or architecture – these are things he thought a lot about. The way the green sits under the black, there is something about the relationship between the two, I get a sense of an exchange between gravity and levity; heaviness and lightness. This feels like a painting about painting, or maybe it's a painting about space – about the way things exist in relation to each other, something Kelly explored throughout his practice. Thinking about this reminds me of Mondrian and Miro. Painters just keep looking at each other’s work, don’t they?