Alice Baber (1928-1982) was an American abstract expressionist painter, best known forthe organic, biomorphic forms she painted using a staining technique which allowed her to explore pure colour and elicit a sense of radiant light.
Baber’s stylistic development during the period between 1958 and the mid-1970s ischaracterized by a series of experiments with color and technique. Having turned toabstraction 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 thefirst half of the 1950s she worked primarily in oil, but soon began to dilute her paint inorder to emphasize the different shades of color, eventually expanding her practice toinclude 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 andluminosity, as well as her interests in joining light and color in a kinetic fusion.
“When I first conceive of a painting, I mustfeel it, I hear it, I taste it, and I want to eatit. I start from the driving force of color(color hunger); then comes to a secondcolor to provide light, luminous light. It willbe the glow to reinforce the first color. Ithen discover the need of one, two, three,or more colors which will indicate andmake movement, establish thepsychodynamic balance in midair, allowfreedom to take place, add weight at thetop and bottom of painting, and createmythical whirlpools between larger forms.”Alice Baber, Color, 1972
Watercolour on paper
11 x 10 in (27.9 x 25.4 cm)