Color Field

Color Field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to Abstract Expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering Abstract Expressionists. Color Field is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favour of an overall consistency of form and process. In color field painting "color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself."

During the late 1950s and 1960s, Color field painters emerged in Great Britain, Canada, Washington, DC and the West Coast of the United States using formats of stripes, targets, simple geometric patterns and references to landscape imagery and to nature.

Historical roots

The focus of attention in the world of contemporary art began to shift from Paris to New York after World War II and the development of American Abstract Expressionism. During the late 1940s and early 1950s Clement Greenberg was the first art critic to suggest and identify a dichotomy between differing tendencies within the Abstract Expressionist canon. Taking issue with Harold Rosenberg (another important champion of Abstract Expressionism), who wrote of the virtues of Action Painting in his famous article American Action Painters published in the December 1952 issue of ARTnews, Greenberg observed another tendency toward all-over color or Color Field in the works of several of the so-called "First Generation" Abstract Expressionists.

The Colour Field

The Colour Field was the second release by the British new wave band, The Colourfield. This EP was released only in the US. The UK had already seen all of the songs released as either a single or a 12".

Track listing

All tracks written by Terry Hall and Toby Lyons

Personnel

References