Curator, Gary Garrels: To me your work is very fundamentally about light and color, and the spectrum is how light is fractured and distinguished into color. We have The Propitious Garden of Plane Image.
Artist, Brice Marden: It’s a little pretentious, I acknowledge that. But I’ve been looking at Chinese gardens. Chinese artists were considered scholars, poets, and artists at the same time. And they would keep these rocks in their studios as sort of meditative references to the landscape. So I decided to make myself a propitious garden.
A friend of mine, who is a numerologist, told me my number was six. So they’re painted on six panels. They’re four by six feet. There’s all these six references. So that’s the propitious part.
Gary Garrels: But you’ve also just distilled the spectrum into six colors.
Brice Marden: Right. It’s supposed to have seven, but I didn’t understand indigo. So I dropped it. The secret is to make them read as one painting.
Gary Garrels: You begin with a monochrome ground, and then begin to build it up with layers of these linear forms. It goes from left to right.
Narrator: Let’s start with the red panel on the left. On top of it, Marden adds the first linear element, orange. The other lines appear to be layered beneath it.
Brice Marden: It goes orange, yellow, green, blue, purple.
Narrator: As you move to the right, the first linear element is always the color of the preceding panel. The order of the colors never changes.
Brice Marden: The orange panel, … it goes yellow, green, blue, purple, red. And on the yellow panel, it goes green, blue, purple, red, orange. That’s the progression.