Onement VI 1953

This is Barnett Newman’s “Onement VI”, a large canvas dominated by a deep, mesmerizing blue, bisected by a vertical white line. It's like a portal or a doorway. I've always been fascinated by the physicality of painting and the way artists make choices, like what kind of brush to use or how much paint to put on the canvas. With Newman, I imagine him wrestling with this huge blue field, pushing the paint around until it hums just right. Then comes that white stripe. You can almost feel the tension, the careful deliberation. It’s easy to see Newman's work as cold or austere, but for me, there’s so much emotion in the way that white line sings against the blue. Think about Agnes Martin, or even Rothko – artists who were trying to find something spiritual in the material of painting. It's like they were searching for a way to make the invisible visible.