Doug Ohlson - Within the Red Field

Douglas Dean Ohlson (November 18, 1936 – June 29, 2010) was an American abstract artist who specialized in geometric patterns.
Ohlson was born on November 18, 1936, in Cherokee, Iowa and attended Bethel College before serving in the United States Marine Corps. After completing his military service, he attended the University of Minnesota, where he was awarded a degree in studio art in 1961. He moved to New York City, where he studied at Hunter College under abstract sculptor Tony Smith, but dropped out when he could no longer afford tuition. He worked as an assistant to Smith and started teaching at Hunter College in 1964.Ohlson's early work was included in an exhibit organized by art historian E. C. Goossen at the Hudson River Museum titled "8 Young Artists" in 1964, and had a solo show that year at the Fischbach Gallery, the first of seven at that location. Goossen also included work by Ohlson in the 1968 exhibition "The Art of the Real: 1948-1968" at the Museum of Modern Art which focused on the development and history of geometric art in the United States. Sharply defined and repeated geometric shapes were characteristic of his earliest painting, that were described by Goossen as depicting "yellowish pink and green dawns, blue noons, and red-orange sunsets that swiftly slide from purple to black", hypothesizing that Ohlson's experience growing up and working long days on the family's farm gave him a unique passion for color.Ohlson was recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968.
His works in the 1970s and 1980s, often featured at Susan Caldwell Inc., had characteristically rougher backgrounds. His later work was displayed in numerous solo exhibitions at the Andre Zarre Gallery, in addition to surveys of his work at Bennington College and at Hunter College, where he taught for 35 years. His works are included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.Wikipedia

Color Field Art Gene Davis

Gene Davis (August 22, 1920 - April 6, 1985) was an American Color Field painter known especially for his paintings of vertical stripes of color.Davis was born in Washington D.C. in 1920 and spent nearly all his life there. Before he began to paint in 1949, he worked as a sportswriter, covering the Washington Redskins and other local teams. Working as a journalist in the late 1940s, he covered the Roosevelt and Truman presidential administrations, and was often President Truman's partner for poker games.His first art studio was in his apartment on Scott Circle; later he worked out of a studio on Pennsylvania Avenue.Davis's first solo exhibition of drawings was at the Dupont Theater Gallery in 1952, and his first exhibition of paintings was at Catholic University in 1953. A decade later he participated in the "Washington Color Painters" exhibit at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in Washington, DC, which traveled to other venues around the US, and launched the recognition of the Washington Color School as a regional movement in which Davis was a central figure. The Washington painters were among the most prominent of the mid-century color field painters. Though he worked in a variety of media and styles, including ink, oil, acrylic, video, and collage, Davis is best known by far for his acrylic paintings (mostly on canvas) of colorful vertical stripes, which he began to paint in 1958. The paintings typically repeat particular colors to create a sense of rhythm and repetition with variations. One of the best-known of his paintings, "Black Grey Beat" (1964), owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum reinforces these musical comparisons in its title. The pairs of alternating black and grey stripes are repeated across the canvas, and recognizable even as other colors are substituted for black and grey, and returned to even as the repetition of dark and light pairs is here and there broken by sharply contrasting colorsIn 1972 Davis created Franklin's Footpath, which was at the time the world's largest artwork, by painting colorful stripes on the street in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the world's largest painting, Niagara (43,680 square feet), in a parking lot in Lewiston, NY. His "micro-paintings", at the other extreme, were as small as 3/8 of an inch square.Wikipedia