New Year is traditionally the time for wiping the slate clean so this week’s picture is a tabula rasa of sorts: an all-white work called Document by the American artist Robert Ryman. Painted in 2002, it will be shown in his forthcoming exhibition at Haunch of Venison in
Ryman, who is now in his early seventies, has spent more than half a century painting exclusively white pictures, although he prefers to phrase the matter differently. “I don’t think of myself as making white paintings,” he once told an interviewer. “I make paintings; I’m a painter. White paint is my medium.” He needed quite a lot of it to create Document, which is both a large picture – six-and-a-half-feet square – and a comparatively densely worked one. There is something engagingly obsessional about the work, formed as it is from a squarish, clotted mass of almost identically hooked brushstrokes, almost but not quite spread to the edges of an unprimed and unframed canvas. The paint has been pushed around in dense wriggling shapes that remind me of worms in a baitbox. Looking at it is a little like listening to someone whisper the same thing a thousand times over, until sense disappears and all that is heard is a hissing, repeated mantra. But eventually the effect of the picture can be quite calming, radiant even, like contemplating a field of snow.
Ryman himself says he dislikes it when people compare his pictures to experiences of nature (or indeed to anything much in particular). He originally chose to work exclusively in white, by his own account, because he “wanted to paint the paint”, by which I think he meant that he wanted people to attend to the structure and texture of the painted surface – and not to look...
