Abstract

In the 1940s climate of artistic confusion, the author, then a student of art in New York City, had the impulse to try to create an extremely minimal art form. He developed the conviction that significant art could be made by using the most elementary media—a conviction confirmed by the history of art. Establishing certain basic constraints, he began to draw a series of crow-quill black-and-white images, inspired in part by Picasso illustrations and also by mathematical coordinate plots. He named the new art forms ‘Schemas’ because they reminded him of schematic diagrams. The author analyzes the elements of his Schemas, using examples culled from the hundreds he has created over the years, and shows how they evolved into color images. His position is that an artist need not use advanced media, such as computer graphics, to create a new and important art form.

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