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Colour Hunger - Blog Posts
Alice baber
“When I first conceive of a painting, I must feel it, I hear it, I taste it, and I want to eat it. I start from the driving force of color (color hunger); then comes to a second color to provide light, luminous light. It will be the glow to reinforce the first color. I then discover the need of one, two, three, or more colors which will indicate and make movement, establish the psychodynamic balance in midair, allow freedom to take place, add weight at the top and bottom of painting, and create mythical whirlpools between larger forms.”
Alice Baber, Color, 1972
Alice Baber (1928-1982) was an American abstract expressionist painter, best known for the organic, biomorphic forms she painted using a staining technique which allowed her to explore pure color and elicit a sense of radiant light.
Baber’s stylistic development during the period between 1958 and the mid-1970s is characterized by a series of experiments with color and technique. Having turned to abstraction in 1958, she began exploring a monochromatic approach to painting, primarily using shades of red. By 1960 Baber came to add yellows, greens, and lavender to her work. She gradually incorporated a growing variety of colors into her canvases, a process that reached its hiatus by the mid 1970s when she finally introduced black to her work, achieving a new range of effects and subtleties.
Her evolving approach to painting is also characterized by her choice of materials. In the first half of the 1950s she worked primarily in oil, but soon began to dilute her paint in order to emphasize the different shades of color, eventually expanding her practice to include also acrylic on canvas and watercolors on paper as alternatives to oil. Watercolors in particular lent themselves more easily to her growing interest in transparency and luminosity, as well as her interests in joining light and color in a kinetic fusion. Baber also worked with acrylic. Working in both mediums in parallel led to discoveries that altered the course of Baber’s painting, a method of ‘sinking’ (or ‘staining’) and ‘lifting’ to create abstract, organic forms – a visual style that has since become her signature. Color would remain central to the artist’s practice throughout her career, a theme on which she wrote at length in several publications, and which became the subject of exhibitions the artist curated, including Color Forum, a large-scale group exhibition held at the University of Texas, Austin, 1972.
Post-war feminist artist and lithographer Alice Baber produced brilliantly colored abstract expressionist oil and watercolor paintings by staining her canvases with rounded biomorphic forms. Using a technique of pouringdiluted oil paint onto a canvas in layers, she sometimes experimented with variations of a single hue and at other times created a purposeful interplay of different tones, as in The Song of the Wind (1977). Baber referred to her attempts to relay feelings through color as a “color hunger,” and exploration of “the infinite range of possibilities.” A member of the cooperative March Gallery in downtown New York, where she held her first solo exhibition in 1958, Baber was married to noted Abstract Expressionist painter Paul Jenkins. Baber’s work can be found in the collections of the Met, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Wheel of Jaguar, 1982
Watercolor on Paper 12 × 11 in | 30.5 × 27.9 cm
The Light Inside the Mountain, 1978
Oil on canvas 33 × 55 in | 83.8 × 139.7 cm
Just Arrived, 1962
Oil on canvas 57 × 44 in | 144.8 × 111.8 cm
UNTITLED
watercolor on paper, 22 x 30 IN unframed, 33.5 x 41.5 IN unframed