Red and Red

Label

Pat Steir has said that she makes her paintings with the attitude of a gymnast: “first the meditation, then the leap.” In her recent paintings, including Red and Red, Steir has poured, splashed, and dripped pigment thinned with turpentine onto vertically hung canvases to create luscious washes and veils of richly colored paint. This practice is informed by the ideas of her friend the late composer John Cage, who similarly embraced chance and accident in his music and performances. Steir has stated, “I’m walking a thin line between image and not image [in this painting], between flat and deep space.”

Best known for her paintings of waterfalls, in which the dripped and splashed paint replicates the natural process of falling water, Steir was born in Newark, New Jersey, and currently lives and works in New York City. While her early monochrome paintings were informed by minimalism and conceptual art, Steir developed a highly personal iconography in the 1970s utilizing isolated brushstrokes and other marks, including words and images that are sometimes crossed out. During the 1980s, she began a way of painting that led to her images of waterfalls and other works that evoked the night sky and the Milky Way.

From the 2019 exhibition The Expanding Universe of Postwar Art, curated by John R. Stomberg Ph.D, Virginia Rice Kelsey 1961s Director

I’m walking a thin line between image and not image, between flat and deep space. --Pat Steir

Pat Steir has said that she makes her paintings with the attitude of a gymnast: “first the meditation, then the leap.” In her recent paintings, including Red and Red, Steir has poured, splashed, and dripped pigment thinned with turpentine onto vertically hung canvases to create luscious washes and veils of richly colored paint. This practice is informed by the ideas of her friend the late composer John Cage, who had a shared interest in Zen philosophy’s embrace of chance and accident in his music and performances.

From the 2023 exhibition The Painter's Hand: U.S. Abstraction since 1950, curated by John Stomberg, Virginia Rice Kelsey 1961s Director

Imagine climbing a ladder, paint bucket in hand, to pour and drip veils of color, starting at the top. Would you feel the freedom to pour or the impulse to try to direct each drip? What would you leave to gravity and chance? At once carefully calibrated and seemingly random, Pat Steir’s paintings look easy. Her methods, refined and practiced over decades, evolved in part through study of Japanese and Chinese painting. Though she now relies on a scissor lift to ascend, Pat Steir still paints daily at the age of eighty-five.

From the 2024 exhibition Immersive Worlds: Real and Imagined, curated by Amelia Kahl, Barbara C. & Harvey P. Hood 1918 Senior Curator of Academic Programming and Neely McNulty, Hood Foundation Curator of Education

Course History

SART 31, SART 72, Painting II, III, Colleen Randall, Spring 2015

SART 31, 72, Painting II, III, Jennifer Caine, Winter 2019

Studio Art 25.01, Painting I, Daniele Genadry, Summer 2023

Philosophy 1.11, Art: True, Beautiful, Nasty, John Kulvicki, Summer 2023

Philosophy 1.11, Art: True, Beautiful, Nasty, John Kulvicki, Summer 2023

First Year Student Enrichment Program - Cultures, Identities and Belongings, Francine A'Ness, Summer 2023

Studio Art 15.04, Drawing I, Enrico Riley, Fall 2023

Studio Art 17.08, Digital Drawing, Karol Kawiaka, Fall 2023

Studio Art 25.01, Painting I, Jen Caine, Fall 2023

Writing 5.05, Image and Text, Becky Clark, Fall 2023

Writing 5.06, Image and Text, Becky Clark, Fall 2023

Exhibition History

Immersive Worlds: Real and Imagined, Churchill P. Lathrop Gallery, William B. Jaffe and Evelyn A. Jaffe Hall Galleries, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, July 13-December 15, 2024.

Pat Steir: For Philadelphia, Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, May 2-June 21, 2014.

The Expanding Universe of Postwar Art, Northeast Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, January 26-December 1, 2019.

The Painter's Hand: U.S. Abstraction since 1950, William B. Jaffe and Evelyn A. Jaffe-Hall Galleries, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, June 3-December 16, 2023.

Publication History

John R. Stomberg, The Hood Now: Art and Inquiry at Dartmouth, Hanover, New Hampshire: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 2019, p. 214, ill. plate no. 145.

Provenance

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; sold to present collection, 2014.

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