Narrator: For works like this, Whitten developed a technique of layering the paint on the canvas, and then using the tool he called his “Developer” to finish the image.
Artist, Jack Whitten: This tool allowed me to sweep the paint across the surface of the canvas. It's literally, shoop! As fast as you can get across there. One horizontal sweep.
Narrator: If Whitten was unhappy with the way the image looked, he had to react quickly.
Jack Whitten: This was a big studio. The ceiling height was over 14 feet. I had created a crow's nest with a ladder to go to the top of the studio, because that's the only way I could see. So I had to go up the ladder to the crow's nest to make a decision, run back down, re-pull, recalculate. So the decisions had to be made very split second, while it's wet. You're working wet into wet.
And then if it's not what I want and it's struggling, I would wipe it out. Or sometimes I would leave it down, say the hell with it, let it dry out. Come back and start the whole thing over. But the important thing was the one gesture. That was what's most important to me.