An Accordment #80 1974

Perle Fine made "An Accordment #80" with paint, and what looks like a lot of planning. The linear grid is really the star here, and it makes me think about all the different ways that artists have tried to wrangle geometry. Up close, you can see that the lines aren’t perfect. The violet paint is thin in some spots, allowing the underpainting to peek through, which creates a kind of atmospheric depth. There's a beautiful tension between the rigidity of the grid and the slightly wobbly hand that laid it down. Look at the top right corner for example, where the purple fades out like a watercolor, or the smudged blue lines, where you get a real sense of the artist's hand. Agnes Martin's grids come to mind, or maybe even some of Sol Lewitt's wall drawings. But Fine’s painting has this really distinctive, almost tender quality to it. It’s a testament to how much emotion and expression can be packed into the simplest of forms.