Three Panels. Orange, Dark Gray, Green 1986

With Three Panels, Ellsworth Kelly gave us orange, dark gray, and green. That's it, and that's everything. I can imagine Kelly, going into his studio each day, thinking about form and color, maybe feeling like, "how do these three get along?" The forms sit near each other, but are separate. You might want to bring them closer but there’s space between them, like a breath. I like to think about what other painters he was looking at. Did he look at Matisse's cut-outs and think about flatness? Did he see what the color guys where doing and think about geometry? Painters are always looking at each other's stuff and borrowing and riffing and making something new and different. Painting is just one big conversation, right?