An Artist Speaks: Gene Davis

By March of 1959 I had another show at the Jefferson Place Gallery, mostly of black-and-white action paintings. It was then that I finally came to the conclusion that I had gone as far as I could with action painting. At that time, although I had a number of works in the new direction, I lacked the courage to exhibit them. In April of 1959 came my first overall stripe paintings in the current series. The first ones were narrow pin-stripes, two colors, edge to edge. I was very interested in shallow space and kept the colors pale. In a very short time, however, I widened the stripes to about one inch and used colors at maximum intensity. They were still overall, however.