Kenneth Noland (1924-2010)

When I read yesterday about Kenneth Noland’s death at the age of 85, I recalled the influence his paintings had on my early awareness of contemporary art. As I have previously written in an essay titled “Jasper Johns: Poetry, Painting, and a Sense of Life,” I believe “my true introduction to compelling contemporary art occurred when I attended the extensive ‘Jasper Johns Retrospective’ at the Whitney Museum in the end of 1977.” However, I have always regarded Noland as a fitting complementary figure, whose symmetrical and often-minimalist images frequently gave an effective impression of movement on the canvas (itself occasionally oddly shaped or with various sharp-angles) due to their edginess—especially the circles with uneven edges, appearing as if frozen only for a moment, perhaps like photographed spinning rings or fireworks pinwheels blurred when stilled in a frame of film.

The juxtaposition of vivid colors within fields in the images—whether in parallel lines or crisscross plaid patterns or concentric circles—usually creates an interesting emphasis on contrast that enhances the painting’s visual drama. Consequently, though the artwork’s geometric abstraction may seem coldly constructed, the response for viewers would contain more warmth since the colors seem to radiate from the painting’s surface, and the colors in the circles at times seem to shimmer the way heat or light might from a halo of fire.

In his book, American Visions (Knopf, 1997), art critic Robert Hughes described some of Noland’s compositions: “Noland’s circle paintings, in particular, seemed to expel everything ‘inessential’ to painting. No representation—it mattered that they weren’t targets, like Jasper Johns’s, but abstract circles. No drawing. A blazing sensuousness of color carried them, intensified by the circular format; since the circles were centered in square canvases, their form seemed gravity-free, not to be read as solid substance. The color seemed to come out of the weave of the canvas, as though dyed onto it; Noland used Magna, a synthetic pigment which gave a more even and intense wash than dilute oils. ‘I wanted color to be the origin of the painting,’ Noland said in 1969.”

Noland, who had lived on a farm once owned by Robert Frost, repeatedly displayed what I discerned as poetic notions in his energetic paintings. I have regularly written about similarities I perceive between various formal approaches to art and some poetic techniques, perhaps among the reasons contributing to my enjoyment of ekphrastic poetry that seems to combine elements of the two disciplines. Indeed, in the past, when comparing Kenneth Noland’s circles and Jasper Johns’s targets, I sometimes considered Noland’s works as exhibiting characteristics closer to what I was attempting in designing my own poetry.

Although I greatly admired Johns’s artwork and how his depictions of targets, flags, or other objects were persuasive and proposed to me ways poetic language equally can establish everyday images filled with ambiguity or allusion that are just as suggestive for readers, I often found Noland’s pictures to be a bit more expressive—less static, instead circles hinting at motion and grids in a linear arrangement apparently aiming toward a dimension beyond the flat plane within the picture’s frame.

Likewise, in an attempt to arrive at an effect even a little like that Noland accomplishes so well in his paintings, I hope my poems—including those seemingly simpler pieces that appear more narrative or straightforward—achieve the goal of maintaining a dynamic and ongoing sense of surprise or uncertainty in their composition that implies further development beyond the last line of the final stanza, extending one’s interest with the continuing feeling of wonder I felt when first witnessing Noland’s deceptively minimalist works decades ago, a pleasant response I still experience today.