Solar Diary (Needle Park) 1972

Gene Davis made this painting, Solar Diary (Needle Park), using vertical stripes of colour. It’s like he’s taken the idea of a diary and translated it into pure colour. Imagine him standing in front of this large canvas, armed with a brush, marking out the days, not with words, but with these bright, zingy stripes. I can see the orange ground humming, pushing those yellows, greens, and creams forward. Each stripe, thin or thick, is like a little note, a thought, a feeling laid down on the canvas. The texture looks smooth, and I wonder how many layers it took to get those colours just right, like a song slowly being built up, note by note. Davis was clearly into the stripe as a form, and you can see echoes of that idea in the work of other painters like Barnett Newman, but with Davis, there’s a sense of play, of rhythm, that’s all his own.