Since completing his art education in the early 1960s, Sam Gilliam has been creating richly color abstract compositions using watercolors on Japanese washi paper.

The application of watercolor is inherently more unruly than that of other types of paint—it bleeds into the fibers of the paper, resistant to the careful control that is possible with oil or acrylic on canvas. In graduate school, one of Gilliam’s professors had pushed him to produce watercolors on paper as a way of mitigating a sense of control. Several years later, for an exhibition at the Adams-Morgan Gallery in Washington, D.C., in 1963 Gilliam had chosen to include one solitary watercolor in the show, marking the moment that he began to seriously consider the possibility that the medium could occupy a central place in his artistic practice. 

Gilliam has since pushed the chromatic and textural possibilities of watercolors with unprecedented verve. His works saturate the paper support with luminous pigment and transform the composition into an object, rather than an image.

The techniques that Gilliam has explored in watercolor—staining, folding, and otherwise distressing the surface of the paper—have exerted a powerful effect on his artistic practice as a whole. His early approach to watercolor expanded upon the staining technique that was adopted on canvas by several other Washington School colorists in the late 1950s and early ’60s, including Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland. As Gilliam’s practice matured, his watercolors began to play a powerful role in shaping his own approach to the canvas, opening up a new sense of freedom and an embrace of abstraction.

Gilliam’s most recent watercolors extend this ongoing practice, making color into a palpable thing, a physical, textural presence that seems to belong more to our world than to the two-dimensional surface of the painting. Color and support are inseparable: the paper becomes the color, rather than a conveyer or carrier for it. Like his draped canvases, a sense of depth in the creases and folds of the fabric is echoed in the composition of each watercolor painting. Vertical washes of color on each flattened surface create the illusion of folds or pleats within rich and rhythmic planes of light and dark that bleed and overlap. Like much of Gilliam’s work, both chance and choice play an important role, echoing the artist’s love of jazz, with its improvisatory ethos and spontaneity.

Please copy and paste the following link to access our Online Viewing Rooms: https://www.pacegallery.com/online-exhibitions/sam-gilliam/