Peter Stroud continues to make relief paintings in emulsion on masonite. However, his recent works can no longer fittingly be called “hard-edge abstractions” as they were, appropriately, only a few years ago when Stroud was one of the “rising newer talents” in England.
Stroud’s paintings, now at Nicholas Wilder, are basically involved more with color and a sort of linear-spatial elasticity than with edges as such. There are two basic formats in this group, and a radical variance in scale. The largest paintings (up to about 8 by 9 feet) are five-sided. There is one in red with pink ridges and one in dark turquoise with green. There is also a very large four-sided one in brown with blue linear ridges. The colors in these are strangely lifeless, especially in the context of Stroud’s oeuvre as a whole. The relief lines traverse the works horizontally from edge to edge and slightly obliquely (parallel) from top to bottom, following the contour of one side of the support. The intersecting lines mark off series of irregular rhomboids which pull and push at each other across the face of the paintings. In these very large works the craftsmanship is not altogether satisfactory, as they are built in sections, sometimes imperfectly fitted together. The artist’s hand is very much evident, too, in the painted surfaces which, though monotonal, are slightly uneven. These imperfections have a negative effect on the works viewed closely; moreover, the overall material sense of these very large pieces is unwieldy.
Blooster (47 x 76 1/2”), like most of the smaller works, is in the shape of an obverse trapezoid. It is royal blue all over. The design created by the ridges is bounded within the margins of the support, but six-sided. The grid pattern here is simply a matter of vertical bent lines placed symmetrically over horizontals. Yandine, 20 x 31 1/2”, is orange with an octagonal shape within, and ray-like lines. Malovar Lighted (same dimensions) is red, and has a similar, inverted, internal design.
Stroud is still interested in near-black tonalities: the two darkest paintings in this exhibition come off well. They are both medium-sized trapezoids (38 x 53”) called, respectively, Dansac Brownreds and Dansac Redbrowns. The former is black with maroon ridges; the latter is deep violet-blue with blue. Like the largest ones, the lines here reach to the edges of the supports and the overall effect is of elastic tension.
Certainly the smaller paintings are necessarily less involved with the concept of lines tugging across interrelated surface spaces—this requires an environmental scale—than the large ones. But they are colored more vividly and are more pristine in their craft than the others.
John McCracken is showing six leaning planks at Nicholas Wilder. They are each larger in every dimension than in his first plank series of 1966. Partly for this reason, they are less successful.
The chief virtue of the leaning plank idea is its interplay with the supporting wall and wider environment. This relation has proved, both as an idea and as an experience, to be replete with interesting implications. The crucial factor determining its success when confronted in the flesh turns out to be the scale and proportion of the plank, and not its color. Color tends to be perceived in this case as one distinct property and the plank-wall environment relationship as another. Thus the value of the total effect increases the more primary and stable, and the less startling, the color. The pigments chosen for the series in question are pulsating, half-breed hues. The 1966 planks—red, white and blue respectively, each measuring 96” x 11 1/2” x 1”—are flawlessly proportioned. Whereas the lighter planks have a feeling of portability, of an almost impudent temporariness, the larger ones stand heavily planted. Their presence is too much felt. The original purity of “McCracken’s plank-thing” has succumbed to a bigger, lesser thing.
McCracken makes the planks out of plywood and fiberglass, coated with polyester resin into which the pigments are mixed (the earlier ones were painted). The surfaces are glossy and translucent. Each color equivocates to a greater or lesser degree. The vermilion, chartreuse and turquoise-blue are very intense; the pink and sky-blue glow more opaquely; the heliotrope is so sensitive to light that it shifts in and out of pink.
—Jane Livingston
