So, in 1964, Irwin arrived at the question, “How does one paint a painting without a linear mark?” One possible solution—that of merely refraining from applying the lines to the contiguous color field of the ground—made sense intellectually but failed to work experientially. The resultant canvas tended to read as a spatial vacuum, a void, rather than a “positive assertion of space,” a field of energy. As Walter Hopps described in his catalog essay for the 1965 São Paulo Bienal, what Irwin was after was not so much a color field as “a field of color energy.”
Irwin’s solution to the problem…was disarmingly simple, or at least apparently so. “I’ll explain it very quickly,” Irwin offers. “In the dot paintings I took a large squarish canvas and painted it an even bright white. (Actually, I used a special kind of paint: I prepared the canvas with a series of thin coats of Lucien Lafitte Fournier silver-white, which was the best white lead paint I could find. The white lead was necessary, in that while it would of course yellow with age, as will all whites, if you expose white lead to ultraviolet light for a short period, it will very quickly return to pure white.) Then I put on the dots, starting with very strong red dots, as rich as possible but only about the size of map pins, put them on very carefully, about one every quarter inch or so, such that they seemed neither too mechanically nor too crudely applied—either way they would have thereby drawn attention to themselves as patterns—concentrating them toward the center and then dispersing them less and less densely, missing one or two here and there, as they moved out toward the edge. Then I took the exact opposite color and put a green dot between every single pair of red dots, doing the same thing out to the edge, stopping the green maybe just a little before the red so that there was a slight halation of the two colors on the edge. But in the center they essentially canceled each other out, so that you didn’t see either green or red but rather the energy generated by the interaction between the two.
“Basically,” he continued, “the paintings would vibrate.”
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…by 1964 Irwin was spending much of his time outside the canvas, attending to cracks and windows and floorboards, because all of these things were impinging on the reality of the canvas. But those incidental circumstances were becoming interesting to Irwin in their own right. And as he now admits, “Already then I was literally breaking out of the picture plane as the center of my concern. I was becoming more interested in the room.” This interest would now expand over the next few years: by 1969 he would be making rooms without objects, and by 1970 he would abandon his studio altogether.
