Ellsworth Kelly, Remembered

Last year, I went to see a series of paintings by Ellsworth Kelly at the Sotheby's showroom in New York. Each individual painting was smaller than the size of some desktop computers, and at first blush they seemed quite simple: one or two oblong, colorful shapes gathered near the center of the ecru canvas.

They're the kind of paintings some people see and then call me to complain, "How is this art?" But I just revisited my diary from that day, and in the hurried sprawl of someone who just has to blurt it out I had written, "Magic, magnetic paintings: like the fuzzy, blinking shapes you see when you stare too hard at the sun."

Ellsworth Kelly died on Sunday. He was 92. Over the seven decades of his career, Kelly influenced abstract impressionism, was a key figure in American postwar art, revolutionised color theory, and provided immense joy to those of us who number among his admirers.

An Ellsworth Kelly is usually identifiable from across the room. Solid colors are the subject, often piercing the canvas at unexpected angles. Lines are rigid, except when they aren't; circles aren't perfectly round, unless of course, they are. Even when there's no symmetry, and two panels meet not to cohere but in a cantilever, Kelly's exact, careful approach is what separates his art from so many who have tried to do the same.

Kelly's paintings range from the regimented: he is known for his series of evenly-spaced color blocks, an architectural prism, to the freeing: a silver crescent winks on a wall, less the shape of a sickle than its quick swipe through the air.

Or, as Oscar Wilde - who must have been predicting Kelly's artistic career - said, "Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in the thousand different ways."

Unallied with definite forms, Kelly's paintings block our brain's automatic inclination to turn each shape into a thing. They're the reverse of Rorschach Tests, which ask the viewer to pour histories and complexities into nonspeaking blots. In a Kelly painting, one receives universes, becomes flooded with feeling.

He was still working diligently on his art just one month ago.

"I give what I've got," he said in an interview with The Guardian. "It's harder. But then, the visions were always too much... I feel like the world is over there, and it keeps coming at me, and I want to do it, respond to it."

Over his long life, Kelly saw five American wars, a dozen economic recessions. He was married. He moved to Paris, and he returned. Imagine him, looking upon this world coming at him, and his means of responding to it: technicolour expressions for milestones impossibly vast.

But the greatest gift Kelly has given us is the invitation to rejoice over seeing itself: that unceasing process where the cones in our retinas sensitise lightwaves in order to tell our nerve cells how to perceive color. It might be a gift most of us possess without recognition, but the singularity in Kelly's paintings forces us to remember how our world is a wash of large and small chromatic miracles.

When I try to write about Kelly, and his scorching pigments, I recall Ludwig Wittgenstein, who, in Remarks on Colour, said, "When we're asked 'What do the words 'red', 'blue', 'black', 'white' mean?' We can, of course, immediately point to things which have these colours - but our ability to explain the meanings of these words goes no further!"

In other words, just behold them. Let the power of uninterrupted color spill into the chambers of your mind where everything doesn't need a name.

I've seen Kelly's paintings in several museums and galleries around the world, and my reaction endures. Each painting is a journey to an ultraviolet moment, when your eyes dared to stay open, sunward for a moment too long.

In preparing to write this farewell, I was researching Kelly and found a description of his artist's studio. In it, windows are sparse. He prefers skylights.

(Annapoorna Subramanian is a reporter and anchor for NDTV Prime's On Art, which will air from January 8)

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