Sixth Stone III 1964

Lee Bontecou made this print, Sixth Stone III, by layering black and white in concentric circles. I'm thinking about the artist making this, maybe proofing it and re-doing it again and again... It feels like a game of seeing how much weight those soft-looking textures can hold. I wonder what they were thinking as they built up those layers. It is fascinating, the way the central void pulls you in, like looking down a well, or maybe up into the night sky. It makes me think of a portal, a deep, dark, abstract space, all contained on this one piece of paper. Bontecou’s like a lot of artists, exploring the push and pull between chaos and order, between the known and the unknown. Making art can be about embracing those uncertainties, using them to open up new ways of seeing and thinking.