"A" and the Carpenter I

With an artistic career spanning more than six decades, abstract painter Sam Gilliam continually pushed the boundaries of color and form. Associated with the Washington Color School movement, it was in the early 1960s when Gilliam began staining unprimed and unstretched canvases with diluted acrylic paint rather than using traditional brushstroke techniques. By the end of the 1960s, he started experimenting with crumpling, folding, and draping these canvases before arranging them in site-specific spaces or wrapping them around variably shaped framed stretchers to dispense a more sculptural approach. The malleability of these canvases echoes the fluidity of the paint and vice versa. A quintessential work, “A” and the Carpenter I is a painting on a grand scale, and yet, like a stained drop cloth slung across two sawhorses, it evokes a snapshot of the artist’s studio.