Away

Kenneth Noland was a major contributor to the aesthetics of American Color Field painting, which experimented with highly simplified abstract forms and pure saturated color. Noland stained the surfaces of his unprimed canvases rather than painting with a brush. He was interested in removing all texture, gesture, and emotional content from his paintings and developed a signature style including concentric circles, chevrons, and stripes.

The sharply defined V-shaped diagonals of his chevrons did not indicate receding space but explore the relationships between contrasting or complementary colors. Painted in thin yet opaque layers, each tone reveals its particular characteristic weight, density, and transparency. Noland emphasized spatial relationships in his work by leaving unstained, bare canvas as a contrast against the colorful hues used throughout his paintings.