Ontwerp voor een tapijt met verticale banen Possibly 1924 - 1928

This is Dirk Verstraten’s ‘Design for a Carpet with Vertical Stripes’, and I’m imagining him carefully ruling these lines, and painting in the flat planes of colour. I wonder what he was thinking while he was working on this. I feel like he was excited about this painting, and its blocks of colour. He was looking at something and reducing it down to what he considered its essence: its colours and stripes. The painting’s got this central field of matte purple, really lovely, bookended by verticals of warm oranges on one side and cooler blues and blacks on the other. It’s quite minimal, but the hand drawn element brings out the work's warmth. You can see how it anticipates a lot of colour field painting that comes after. Artists are always looking at what came before them, taking inspiration and making something new. What will you make?