Golden Presence 1961

Richard Pousette-Dart made Golden Presence with paint, of course; I imagine him patiently building up its surface, one tiny, shimmering dab at a time. It feels like a vast field of wheat at harvest time, or maybe a close-up of sand on a beach when the sun hits it just right. All these little touches, like individual thoughts, or prayers, create something that's bigger than the sum of its parts. You can tell he’s not trying to represent anything literal; rather, he is conjuring a feeling, a sense of awe. Pousette-Dart was part of the Abstract Expressionist generation, like Pollock or Rothko, but he had his own distinct vision. There's a mystical quality to his work, a sense of the infinite contained within the finite. It's a very human thing to want to make something so huge and eternal out of something so simple as dots of paint.