Ayin 1958

Morris Louis made this big, beautiful painting, Ayin, with acrylic on canvas. Look at the way he's poured and stained the canvas. It's all about process, about letting the paint do its thing, and seeing what happens. The colors here, they’re so translucent, almost like watercolor, but on this massive scale. I like how the paint isn’t thick or gloppy, but thin, staining the canvas and soaking right in. The vertical lines allude to this feeling of falling and movement. See how some areas are more saturated, while others fade away? The way the colors blend and bleed into each other feels almost like a memory or a dream. It reminds me a bit of Helen Frankenthaler, another painter who was doing really interesting things with color and canvas at the time. But Louis has this way of making the colors feel like they're emerging from the canvas itself. Painting becomes a record of an activity that happened, rather than an image.