Hell's Calendar #3, 1970

Purchased from Dunkelman Gallery, Toronto, early 1970s 

Private Collection, Toronto

Donald Wall, ed., Gene Davis, New York, 1975, page 27 

Jacquelyn Days Serwer with essays by Douglas Davis and Donald Kuspit, Gene Davis: A Memorial Exhibition, Washington, 1987, page 43

Gene Davis, a largely self-taught artist, employed an obsessive approach to repeated taped lines as his primary subject matter. Associated with the Washington Color School, he focused on the primacy of colours by staining acrylic paint directly onto canvases of various sizes and formats. 

In an interview with Donald Wall, Davis addresses the essential question of why he chose stripes. He admits: “That’s not easy to answer. At the very beginning, I saw the equal-width stripe format as a kind of response to the painterliness that was in the air in the late Fifties. Stripes, when evenly deployed, have a quality of clarity that seemed absent in abstract expressionism.” 

The richness of the coloured stripes in Davis’s work Hell’s Calendar #3, which features seven larger stripes enclosing eight smaller stripes of various shades of green, blue, red, pink and orange, creates a push-and-pull effect against the deep violet background. Donald Kuspit describes the effect of the stripes: “Davis’s color-stripes serve a double function. They can be read as metaphors for the states of consciousness that interpenetrate in ‘perception’, or introspective awareness, of duration, and they can be read as literal units in a spatial succession that is abstractly emblematic of temporal flow.”