Pat Steir on Her Career of Splashing Paint

When Pat Steir thinks of her early years in L.A., it’s the light she thinks of first. “[It] was so bright and saturated I couldn’t see the paint colors I mixed. That was 50 years ago,” she said, just before the opening of her new show “Painted Rain” at Hauser & Wirth’s West Hollywood location, on show through May 4th. Now, the legendary American painter and printmaker, known for her pioneering approach to painting, is showing her first solo in Los Angeles after three decades.

The new show at Hauser & Wirth consists of works on canvas that reflect Steir’s recollection of her time in Los Angeles, featuring Steir’s signature poured-paint technique that is also seen in her “Waterfall” works. In this new body of work, reverberating tones and vivid shades of blue are splashed on canvas to reproduce Steir’s memories of the ocean and sky she experienced while teaching at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in the 1970s. In the sprawling 6,000-square-foot exhibition space, each of Steir’s paintings has ample room to breathe, their colors cascading down the length of the canvas.

The first painting the viewer encounters is the eight-foot-tall Blue (2022–23), which features various hues of the title color along with bands of white. These soft layers, created by Steir’s pouring technique, evoke the L.A. skies that Steir has so fondly remembered for over five decades. “The first time I went to L.A. to teach at CalArts in the 1970s, I remember thinking that the city had endless roads, many cars, no place to walk, and shockingly bright sunlight. I saw blue skies and ocean. I was used to New York light, to seeing all colors muted by a gray screen,” she said. “When I think of L.A. now, I think of the sky and the ocean even more than the light, and that’s the origin of my latest work.”

Born in 1938 in Newark, New Jersey, Steir grew up with parents who had both attended art school. “Everyone’s path is shaped by their parents, for better or worse,” Steir said. “I was given oil paints by my father when I had the measles at the age of five. That shaped me.” Even at that early age, Steir knew she was destined to become either a poet or an artist. Since her father encouraged her poetry career, Steir naturally rebelled and decided to be a painter. Yet her father was hesitant about his daughter’s prospects as a working artist, thinking of his own setbacks. “If he hadn’t succeeded in becoming an artist, how could I succeed, as a girl?”

Indeed, Steir has never denied the difficulties of being a woman in the art world—and particularly, of being an abstract painter. “It was very hard to be a female artist in a man’s world of painting. There were a few others ahead of me who I had as examples—Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler—who became very important to me because they were women surviving in a man’s world,” she said. For Steir, feminism was a necessary response to the sexist beliefs that faced her and other women artists at the time. “The fact that I’ve been making my work and exhibiting it since the 1960s, against all odds, reflects my views on feminism,” Steir noted.

After graduating from New York’s Pratt Institute in 1962, Steir participated in her first group show at the High Museum in Atlanta in 1963. By 1964, Steir had become part of the first wave of women artists to gain prominence in the New York art world, with group exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as her first solo exhibition at the Terry Dintenfass Gallery in New York. During the same period, Steir was appointed as an art director at Harper & Row publishers in New York, and later went on to teach at Parsons School of Design, Princeton University, and CalArts. By 1989, Steir had honed her signature approach to painting: the pouring technique that became prominent in her “Waterfall” works. For these paintings, Steir works from a ladder or scissor lift. The height enables her to work above an unstretched canvas that is tacked to the wall. As she pours and splashes paint, it runs down the length of the canvas. This technique not only gives depth to a painting, it creates a harmonious blending and layering of a painting’s vibrant color palette. Each color creates its own individual motif, shaped by gravity.