Artist, Jack Whitten: The ‘90s were a big change. From the ‘90s on, I work with a dry palette. I don’t work with a wet palette anymore.
Narrator: Whitten began constructing work from paint that he had dried and cut into pieces.
Jack Whitten: I start off with pouring layers of paint and I get to the thickness that I want—very thin, paper thin, up to three, seven inches thick. Some of them are even thicker. That’s when I discovered that I could cut the paint into tesserae, a little cube of paint, that I would laminate down to a prepared canvas surface.
Narrator: Whitten experimented with different techniques for making the tesserae and for constructing paintings from them.
Jack Whitten: When you’re working this way, a lot of scrap is left over. Now I have found ways to take that scrap, reincorporate it back into the system. Techniques like freezing it, putting it in a large mortar pestle, grinding the hell out of it, throwing it back into the medium, that kind of a thing. No waste.
The canvas was tacked directly to the wall and I could make it any shape I wanted it. I no longer was bound by the rectangular or the square. I put the tesserae right to the edge, so you got a definitive edge, but a shaped canvas.
Narrator: For Whitten, these new techniques led to paintings that were three-dimensional.
Jack Whitten: They have a very physical presence about them. I’m interested in multi-dimensional space, and this is my way of extending the dimensionality. When the light hits that tesserae, it kicks it back out in multiple dimensions.
Archival audio courtesy of The HistoryMakers Digital Archive and The Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution