Artist, Jack Whitten: After surviving the 1960s with all the emotional turmoil and stuff I went through, I saw that I had to find out something else about painting—what we call the materiality of paint. The studio became more of a laboratory.
Narrator: Whitten constructed a platform on the floor of his studio, which he called a drawing board.
Jack Whitten: It was about 12 feet by about 24 feet, very firmly built, meaning that I could walk across it. Built with plywood, laid out absolutely level. On top was a layer of industrial linoleum, so I could clean properly. The canvas was tacked to the top of that drawing board. What was started here with this big drawing board was a whole series of experimentations that lasted for 10 years: 1970 to 1980. So all of those years I was down on the floor.
Narrator: This is one of Whitten’s “Slab” paintings. To make them, he pulled paint across the canvas using a large, rake-like tool he called “the Developer.” These works also required a new kind of paint.
Jack Whitten: All through the ‘60s I worked primarily with oil paint, but in the ‘70s, I made a big switch to acrylic paint. I’m starting to work fairly large scale—and thick. I was using huge amounts of paint. I mean gallons. The acrylic moves faster. You can pour it and you can flow it out. There’s no way in hell you could do that with oil paint.
Archival audio courtesy of The HistoryMakers Digital Archive and The Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution