“When I put in light and the brushwork, the viewer’s position and movement actually creates the painting.”
Mary Corse
“I always thought that the essence of painting is not about the paint,” Mary Corse said. For more than 50 years, Corse has used painting as a conduit for exploring the potential of light and perception. Dedicated to imparting luminosity into her works through innovative methods and materials, Corse creates paintings that employ light as their primary subject and material. With her White Light paintings, begun in 1968, Corse combines manufactured glass particles and paint in order to create a technologically advanced mixture capable of harnessing and refracting light off the object’s flat surface. In doing so, Corse defies the traditional conventions of the two-dimensional canvas, and generates an energy that extends beyond the paintings’ surface.
Born and raised in California, Corse produced her first White Light paintings during a period of increased engagement with technology among West Coast artists. Corse began her career alongside the Light and Space movement, a loosely defined group of Southern California–based artists who challenged viewers’ traditional modes of perception through the creation of immersive environments and works embedded with artificial light. The establishment in 1967 of the Art and Technology Program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which culminated in an exhibition in 1971, further encouraged collaborations between science and the arts. As a painter committed to utilizing unconventional materials as a means of incorporating light into her work, Corse’s process reflects the unique convergence of artistic and technological experimentation in postwar Los Angeles.
Untitled (First White Light Series) (1968) exemplifies the ways in which Corse responded to the local environment and infrastructure of the L.A. art scene. The concept for this monochromatic painting emerged following a sunset drive down the highway: “I was in Malibu,” Corse recalls, “the West was behind me and everything was lighting up.” In awe of the luminosity generated by highway lane markings, she discovered that she could achieve a similar sense of radiance in her paintings using artificial rather than natural light.
The realization that she could conjure this sensation of light using reflective glass beads changed the trajectory of Corse’s career. To produce this glowing effect in her paintings, she began employing the glass microspheres that the L.A. Department of Transportation used in signage and highway markings. Corse scatters the microspheres across the canvas and incorporates them into her mixture of white acrylic paint and gesso using a heavy-duty brush. Seen from afar, this treatment creates the effect of a static painting with areas of uniform color. Up close, however, the White Light paintings offer dimensionality and motion, relying on the spherical shape of the beads to refract light back into the work’s surrounding environment. The curved surface of the glass collects the light rays onto the painting’s surface and deflects the light toward a common focal point; in this case, the viewer’s eye. Decades after the production of her first White Light painting, the glass microbeads remain the driving force behind Corse’s perceptually complex work. As you walk around her white canvases, their surfaces appear to glimmer and shift in response to the changing relationship between the painting and its observer. “When I put in light and the brushwork, the viewer’s position and movement actually creates the painting.”
Kathleen Maher, Louise Bourgeois 12-Month Intern, Department of Drawings and Prints, 2021
