Stanley Whitney: Six Paintings

First Minute of a Dream, 2009
Oil on linen
72 x 72 "

Champagne and Lion, 2010
Oil on linen
72 x 72 "

Cezanne's Mountain, 2010
Oil on linen
72 x 72 "

Agean, 2009
Oil on linen
72 x 72 "

Blue Meets Yellow, 2011
Oil on linen
72 x 72"

Osawatomie Brown, 2010
Oil on linen
72 x 72 "

Whitney's paintings are geometric in nature, but reflect a deeper understanding about color and touch and are highly concerned about the human relationship to the nature of paint and color theory itself. Being extremely sensitive to the method of how paint is applied to the canvas and whether or not a specific color is repeated twice throughout a painting, Whitney's work is extremely intuitive. He sees color as magical, placed on the canas based on feeling and emotion. His painting background is based in drawings of abstract landscapes, and moved towards color-fieldesque style paintings after a trip to Egypt in 1994. Whitney's work also relates to his identity as an African-American man living among the white-dominated art world.

"Red is dominant. Red, yellow, blue, green. The palette just comes. I follow my work wherever it goes—out the door, around the corner. I gotta follow the work. It's high key now because I'm focusing on intensity. It's kind of a heavy beat—it comes from the West African drumbeat. Music in the African-American community is what saves people. I grew up and music was everything. That's a big part of my painting."

• Stanley Whitney, 2008

Stanley Whitney was born in Philadelphia, PA in 1946. He received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute, and later received his MFA from Yale University in 1972. He has shown his paintings in galleries and institutions throughout the world, some including the Albert Baronian Gallery in Brussels, Christine König Galerie in Vienna, Jack Shainman Gallery in NY, and Barbara Greene Gallery in Miami, FL to name a few. He has won the First Robert De Niro Sr. Prize in Painting in 2011, and the Academy Award from the New York Academy of Arts and Letters in 2010. He lives and works in New York and Parma, Italy.