Back in 2017, I posted about artist Stanley Whitney and his sketchbooks. I hadn’t heard of him before reading about an exhibition and book featuring his sketchbooks, but I remembered him well when I saw his name on the front page of the NY Times Arts section this past weekend.

Stanley Whitney Dances With Matisse

Stanley Whitney starts every painting the same way. Like a bricklayer, the 74-year-old artist paints a horizontal band along the top edge of the canvas, then lays down blocks of saturated color, from left to right, across and down, in a vibrant, wobbly, improvisational grid.

“It’s like call and response — the paintings tell me what to do,” said Whitney, who can move right through the paces in one blast, or jump backward or forward as the canvas requires. 

The article mainly focuses on his paintings, but includes a couple gilmpses of his sketchbooks:

Stanley Whitney’s paintings will be on view at the Lisson Gallery, November 2 – December 18, 2021. Apparently, the same gallery did a show of his drawings last year-:

Last year, a show of Whitney’s sketchbook drawings at Lisson titled “No to Prison Life,” to benefit the philanthropist Agnes Gund’s Art for Justice Fund, “made overt the political statement in the works that one wouldn’t think of as being political,” said Logsdail, the artist’s dealer. Framed by the subject of incarceration, “suddenly the primordial grids and abstract shapes were transformed into a claustrophobic and locked cell,” Gund wrote in a statement about the show. (Whitney’s 2004 canvas “By the Love of Those Unloved” hangs prominently in Gund’s apartment, in place of the Roy Lichtenstein painting she sold to start her fund to help reform the criminal justice system.)

I’m sorry I missed that! I love Stanley Whitney’s bright and energetic colors, both on the large canvases and on his sketchbook pages.