About

In the 1950s and 1960s, artists in Washington, D.C. experimented not only with color, but with the traditional practices of painting often taken for granted. While the invention of abstraction broke the rules of form and subject, at the time many abstract artists were still following the conventional procedure of stretching a canvas, priming it, and painting on it with visible brushstrokes.

Inspired by Helen Frankenthaler, the first Washington Color School artists adopted the technique of staining unprimed, unsized canvas with thinned acrylic paint. By thinning paint and using new techniques …