Page 34 - Studio International - July August 1974

Day 1964
Acrylic on canvas
Albright Knox Art Gallery, anonymous loan

readily move on to the greater unity of all eleven Another Noland operating in a rather As was the case with Shadow Line, the two
wide bands and thereafter to that of the entire similar way is the fine painting, Easterly (1969). pairs of bound colour bands in Easterly are
picture. The total effect is first of all of a kind Like Shadow Line, Easterly works on the basis separated by different colour intervals; and in
of intermesh, whereby the interaction of the of two pairings of wide stripes, with the thin typical Cézannesque7 fashion, the central axis
thin-stripe and wide-stripe patterns creates stripes now confined to the outside. This is displaced from the literal centre of the
a visual ripple that remains nonetheless painting, however, is comparatively pared picture. On both accounts, the divide is
consistent with the integrity of the surface. down, and the rather general tendency for prevented from dominating or deadening the
But also, the horizontal thrust of the stripes and Noland's paintings to divide in two along a picture. But even more, Noland works against
bands has been perfectly set off by the dynamics roughly central axis is now explicit as it was his central axis : the four central bands
of their part-to-part relations up and down the not in Shadow Line. The top of Easterly is increase regularly in size from top to bottom
picture.6 The picture can move in all four quite high-valued and the bottom is low-valued, and so do the two thin outside stripes. This
directions at once without ever losing its basic with the colour bands also paired off by closeness regular gradation in scale, carrying along both
unified quality. of hue. the stripes and the bands, unifies the whole
22