“In the work of Alice Baber, the overall surface of her patterns is composed of intimate rhythms reflecting the artist’s sensibilities, rhythms so complex that they become forms which surpass the obvious definitions.”
R endered in vivid jewel-toned hues, Alice Baber’s Wind Divided Mist the Darker from 1972 is a triumphant example of the artist’s mastery of color. Described by Joseph Masheck upon its exhibition debut, the present work is “something like a color-field work seen through a kaleidoscope” marked by cool, fluid gestures across a reverberating sea of organic form (Joseph Masheck, “IX Painters,” Artforum, vol. 11, no. 8, April 1973, p. 82). Wind Divided Mist the Darker presents Baber’s work before her significant adoption of black pigment, as she swore against using the color until the mid-1970s, instead employing deep indigo pools as the richest points of contrast. Created using her signature staining method of applying diluted paint with linen rags, Wind Divided Mist the Darker possesses the ability to conjure vividly organic scenes through an ethereal and atmospheric dispersion of color. Having been recently rediscovered after years out of the public eye, Baber’s Wind Divided Mist the Darker cements the artist’s rightful place as a pioneer among the most renowned Color Field painters.
“The most remarkable aspect of Baber’s work is the way she blends dissimilar elements. Her spectrum color is pure and ideal, like mathematics. Her modest ameboid shapes are like nature – vital, primal, potential, like unicellular life. Each element transforms the other yet simultaneously functions in a direct and unimpeded fashion.”
While Baber used a variety of abstract forms in her work, she preferred the elongated circles present in Wind Divided Mist the Darker, as she believed they imparted the greatest sense of motion across the composition. Wrapping a linen rag around her fingers, Baber gently caressed her canvas with translucent, spectral color over a luminous white ground, forming the irregular elliptical shapes of roughly similar sizes. More transparent at their centers as a result of Baber’s laborious, t.mes -intensive process, the forms have a breathtaking effect of buoyancy and cluster in rhythmic configurations that flood the entire work with a pulse of unified feeling. Radiant blues emanate along dazzling areas of rich pinks and scarlet, vibrating with brilliant effects. Although color, shape, and light were crucial to Baber’s work, she also emphasized the interplay between positive and negative space. “I often paint a painting until it tells me to stop, and somet.mes s the white ground still shows,” she once said. “In most cases, I try to make the white ground either a pattern, so that it can be both negative and positive space, or if not that, perhaps an atmospheric wind moving the other colors and shapes around.”
