D. Wigmore Fine Art, Inc. is pleased to announce its exhibition Dot, Stripe, Drip: Washington Color Painters featuring the work of Gene Davis (1920-1985) , Thomas Downing (1928-1985) , Howard Mehring (1931-1978), and Paul Reed (1919-2015). The Washington Color School was a group of artists connected by location, materials, and style. Their distance from New York allowed them to experiment with an opening up of color using new acrylic paints stained into raw canvas that broke with the heavy gesture of Abstract Expressionism.
Morris Louis (1912-1962) and Kenneth Noland (1924-2010) started staining acrylic paint into raw canvas after Clement Greenberg took them to Helen Frankenthaler’s studio in 1953 to see Mountain and Sea (1952). Noland was the connector among the group. He taught Howard Mehring and Thomas Downing at Catholic University in the mid-1950s and gave Gene Davis a solo exhibition at the university in 1953. Davis and Paul Reed were friends from high school and visited DC’s wealth of art museums together in the early 1950s. By 1959, each artist worked in thinned acrylic paint poured, rolled, or dripped onto raw canvas. They were formally brought together by Gerald Nordland for the 1965 exhibition The Washington Color Painters that gave the group its name. The exhibition took place at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, established in 1961.
Our exhibition of 16 paintings from 1960 to 1971 shows why the Washington Color Painters were considered a unified school: consistency of materials, geometric style, serial exploration of color, and all-over rhythmic compositions. Each Washington Color Painter worked with Magna diluted with solvents in the 1950s and some by 1960 moved to new water-based acrylics, staining or soaking the thinned paint into unprimed cotton duck canvas. The staining technique produced a uniform matte surface of vibrant color, which seemed to float forward while the raw canvas background receded.
We focus on the four artists that remained in DC in the 1960s: Gene Davis, Paul Reed, Thomas Downing, and Howard Mehring. The four artists made their impact in DC both by exhibiting and teaching. Artists like Alma Thomas and Sam Gilliam came into their own styles after the 1965 Washington Gallery of Modern Art’s exhibition. Thomas and Gilliam were well received as DC had been primed for experimental techniques and materials with a focus on rich color.
