Shoot Six 1965

Sam Gilliam made this angular color burst, *Shoot Six*, probably on canvas, with acrylic paint. I’m imagining him in his studio, maybe music playing, methodically laying down these stripes, each a different color, each bordered by a clean, white line, all shooting from the lower right corner. The paint looks smooth, controlled. It's hard to get that kind of evenness, so he must have been feeling really focused. I wonder if he was thinking about Frank Stella's stripes, or maybe Kenneth Noland's chevrons. There’s something optimistic about these expanding rays of color, and there’s a certain coolness in the hard-edged geometry, but for me, Gilliam’s work is always at its best when it starts to come apart, when the geometry loosens up, and the paint starts to have a voice of its own. Still, you can see how this painting is a step towards his later experiments, toward his draped canvases and explosions of color. We build on what came before.