"I began looking at Chinese Literati paintings and at Southern Song Dynasty pottery and painting, and I realized that I didn’t have to use the brush, that I could simply pour the paint, that I could use nature to paint a picture of itself by pouring the paint. That gravity would paint my painting with me. I was influenced and inspired by John Cage, his idea of non-intention. Essentially, my whole voyage, from that first painting of a young woman, fighting her way through the paint to now, is a search and an experiment. All of my work is a search and an experiment. I don’t consider anything finished, I think of it as all only a step along the way."
W aterfall for the Asian Night is a large and early work from Pat Steir’s emblematic series of Waterfall paintings. Perfectly encapsulating Steir’s painterly sensibility, the present work shows thickly-layered cascading drips of white paint atop a dark black curtain. Waterfall for the Asian Night references the artist’s careful study of Chinese landscape painting, which found its impetus in Steir’s affinity for Eastern spiritual and philosophical traditions. Ultimately, Steir sees her practice as art being captured in motion, as well as a meditative process that draws upon various influences, from Abstract Expressionism to the traditions of the far east.
The artist first initiated her Waterfall series in the late 1980s by dripping, splashing, and pouring paint onto a canvas tacked to the wall. Standing on a ladder, she would apply an ultra-saturated paint brush at the top of the canvas, then remove herself from the action and allow paint to slowly trickle down the canvas. It is thus gravity that takes control over the canvas and paint, allowing chance to dictate the final composition.
Steir arrived on the New York art scene in the 1970s in the afterglow of Abstract Expressionism and at the height of Minimalism. Like Jackson Pollock, her paintings celebrate drip marks and evoke the avant-garde spirit that was Abstract Expressionism. Whereas Pollock’s abstraction elicits the dynamism between action and paint, Steir’s emphasizes the weight of the paint itself rather than the action of the hand behind it. An early example of her Waterfall series, Waterfall for the Asian Night is composed of a muted color palette where the drip of the paint becomes the main subject of the composition.
Waterfall Paintings in Esteemed Museum collects ions
“I don’t think of these paintings as abstract… These are not only drips of paint. They’re paintings of drips which form waterfall images” pictures… [Nor are] they realistic...I haven’t sat outdoors with a little brush, trying to create the illusion of a waterfall. The paint itself makes the picture… Gravity makes the image.”
The present work not only eludes the majesticness of a waterfall, but also embodies the natural fluidity of paint. The running of the paint is preserved in t.mes on the canvas, a tribute to gravity, while remaining frozen in the absence of its continued effects. This tension—between chance and control, movement and stasis—transfixes the viewer, affirming Steir’s artistic expertise. In a conversation with Ted Castle, Steir explained of her works, “When I began making these paintings that show marks, I started with the idea of making a picture of the desire to make a picture. The mark would be the picture, that’s all, a kind of primitive picture of desire” (the artist quoted in Thomas McEvilley, Pat Steir, Cambridge 1995, p. 65). Through a wealth of sources, Steir channels early Chinese ink paintings and the traditions of Modernism through Agnes Martin. She masterfully unleashes critical and formal ground for the technique of drip painting, freeing the drip from the shackles of its now-canonical history in the narrative of post-war American art. Waterfall for the Asian Night is a breathtaking example of Steir’s most renowned series of paintings, resting in balance while evoking the movement of rushing falls.
