Narrator: Whitten called this tool the “Developer.”
Artist, Jack Whitten: This tool allowed me to sweep the paint across the surface of the canvas. One horizontal sweep. At first, that gadget was just a 2 x 4 piece of wood and then I attached a piece of neoprene rubber to the 2 x 4, made it into a giant squeegee. The next stage was a slab of sheet metal attached. By 1977, I’m cutting notches, and I’m doing a lot of experimentations in terms of increments.
I had to find out what I could do with acrylic paint as a medium. I’m after innovation. I could get something different from neoprene rubber that I can get from wood that I could get from sheet metal.
Narrator: Pulling the Developer across the canvas instantly created an image. Whitten compared it to the way a camera works.
Jack Whitten: I knew what was influencing me the most was how photography operates. That small little aperture, little light comes in, you capture light, put it onto a sensitive film. I wanted something like that, but in painting. Not photographic processes, but using photography as analogy.
Archival audio courtesy of The HistoryMakers Digital Archive and The Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution