Subtle Complexity
Terrence Keller was by nature a paint manipulator. He loved to move paint around, drawing with it and into it.
Generally his best works have something of a hand-crafted look to them.
His method of creating art dictated a certain kind of colour intervention, tied to subtlety and blended, nuanced effects, ruling out that kind of clear, contrasted colour composition that Keller also had a talent for.
After his success with Madrid, Keller began experimenting with a broad range of painterly effects. Using repeatable formats in his pieces of art, he often created a sequence of three or four related pictures as he shifted freely between “motifs” as he moved on to, or returned to, another layout. Each separate layout allowed Keller to deal with a slightly different set of variables.
What the variables all shared is a simplification or rationalization of the painting process, thus giving Keller more direct control.
FIRTH OF FOURTH
(1988)
Acrylic on canvas
106.7 x 196.6 cm
Image courtesy of the Woltjen/Udell Gallery.
The simple austerity of Madrid gave way to paintings of more complexity with the artist experimenting with often wildly multi-hued grounds. The piece Fourth of Firth, 1988, was a great example of the success of Keller’s experimentation with paints.
By contrasting the handling of the thick paint with that of the stain or stroked ground, Keller took chances with the ground. The contrast effect of drawing in the thick paint so the it cut across the directional flow of the ground allowed him to let the colour get bright, almost discordant, without destroying the spatial unity of the painting.
The accenting of the surface created by the thick paint seemed to hold everything on the surface, no matter what the colour was doing underneath. He was back to bright colours, but it was bright colour handled in a new way.
The Madrid layout also allowed Keller to do something new with quiet, subtle colours. This can be seen in November Pewter, 1988, a picture that is so subdued in effect that it doesn’t seem to be about colour at all – at least at first.
In this lovely gold-grey painting, the colour slowly emerges, like a reluctant after-image with the effect that the picture seems to glow with an ambiguous light.
Using a highly reflective metallic pigment with the paint, Keller was able to successfully mix it with the thick, semi-transparent gel overlay. This created the effect of light subtly shifting and changing over top of the thinly painted ground.
It was the substance of the thick paint material, the way the peaks and ridges of the semi-transparent gel cast shadows across the surface, that established that the painting was a physical entity, not just coloured air.
Transparency and refracted colour worked especially well in this painting and it probably suggested the idea for a group of similarly formatted works that use a paint formulation called “interference colour.”
NOVEMBER PEWTER
(1988)
Acrylic on canvas
124.5 x 268.0 cm
Courtesy of the Woltjen/Udell Gallery.
MONSOON
(1988)
Acrylic on canvas
143.5 x 255.3 cm
Courtesy of the Woltjen/Udell Gallery.
In his piece, Monsoon, 1988, Keller swept the tinted gel across the mottled stain grounds, leaving a thin coat, like a film, across the surface. At the end of the “sweep”, the left over paint materials pile up in thick blobs along the left and bottom edges.
The design of these pictures brings to mind post-Olitski edge painting, but the resemblance doesn’t go very far. Keller makes more of the transparency of the gelled paint and the effect created by the layering of reflectively pigmented gel over dry, light absorbent stain. The thick gel blob scrapings have more presence as material, as independent shapes perched along the edge, rather than as true edge-drawing.