Narrator: In 1973, Whitten began a series of works he described as “paint as collage.” He started by building up layers of paint in different colors.
Artist, Jack Whitten: Mounds of acrylic paint, thick—three-quarters of an inch was built up. Then the squeegee pulling very liquid acrylic on top of those mounds of dried paint. When that was left to dry, I would take my carpenter’s blade, a little jack plane, extremely sharp, and I would cut through the layers of acrylic.
You can see the different colors in there, within each little sliver of paint, you could see it. And it was a very surprising way to work, because when I build up those mounds of paint, you would forget what’s under there. So every time you hit it with your jack plane, you would be surprised. It’s sort of archaeological, really. The more you do, you start realizing what’s the potential of it.
The battle cry was to make acrylic do anything possible, show all the possibilities of it, and I continue to explore it. So when I saw that paint could be used as this collage, I immediately recognized, this is a fantastic breakthrough with a lot of potential.
Archival audio courtesy of The HistoryMakers Digital Archive