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Paint rushed across Willem de Looper’s taut canvases like mercury, seeking every edge with daring and defiance, jumping with the slightest adjustment of his wrist. This process of staining layers of thinned acrylic paint into unprimed canvas achieved an aura of complete immersion in color – a feeling of weightlessness. He allowed the paint to flow with a vigorous truth to the material. This system stands in stark contrast to the methods of de Looper’s Color School contemporaries, Morris Louis and Sam Gilliam. These artists chose to work on slack, unstretched canvases that shepherded their …