Color Panels for a Large Wall 1978

With Color Panels for a Large Wall, Ellsworth Kelly has made something really alive out of 18 separate, monochrome square panels of simple, hard-edged color. Each block is its own thing, and they make a choir together. Looking at them, I imagine Kelly shuffling these elements around, listening to his intuition as he sought a balance between repetition and variation, harmony and discord. It is almost like the process of writing a musical composition. And it makes you think about the way we see color and how it changes in different contexts. Color is physical. It has a surface, it reflects light, and it interacts with the colors around it. Kelly seems to be saying that what something *is* depends on how it relates to other things. A big influence on lots of later artists, including me. Kelly's work reminds us that painting isn't just about what's on the canvas. It's about the space around it, and about how the artist and viewer bring themselves to the act of seeing.