Constellation, Milky Way 1970

Leon Polk Smith’s ‘Constellation, Milky Way’ is a large painting made of two joined canvases in a circle and oval, painted in blue, white, and black. Imagine him in the studio, wrestling with these shapes, trying to get them just so. The edges of the canvas are crisp, and the colors are applied flat and smooth, giving it a very hard-edged feeling. The white radiates out, the blue sits back, and the black gives the composition weight. The shapes touch, but barely. They float in space, and it’s up to us to make sense of it. Looking at this painting makes me think of Ellsworth Kelly and Carmen Herrera, artists working in a similar vein. There's something very cool and collected about this painting, a reduction to pure form that asks us to consider the relationships between shapes and colors. It reminds us that art-making is like a conversation, always responding to what came before.