
Filtered Yellow, 1968, by Ohio artist Julian Stanczak, is part of Cleveland Museum of Art‘s permanent collection.
From the museum about the artist and the work-
For more than a half century, Julian Stanczak maintained a distinguished career as an abstract painter interested in how vision works. Filtered Yellow features hundreds of alternating reddish and greenish razor-sharp vertical bands that create the illusion of a yellow shape, despite the absence of pure yellow paint. As typical of his work, it emphasizes a high level of technical mastery rivaled by few.
And from the artist’s website about his work-
“My primary interest is color – the energy of the different wavelengths of light and their juxtapositions. The primary drive of colors is to give birth to light. But light always changes; it is evasive. I use the energy of this flux because it offers me great plasticity of action on the canvas. To capture the metamorphoses – the continuous changing of form and circumstance – is the eternal challenge and, when achieved, it offers a sense of totality, order, and repose. Color is abstract, universal – yet personal and private in experience.”
“If I take time to really look at what I’m seeing, there is no limit to the secrets unveiled. I look to nature for clarification and crystallization, for things that I can use in my paintings. I live in the moment of recognition. In search for power through abstract clarity, I select shapes that have the maximum possibility for metamorphic action. We can only see what we understand!”
