From the orbicular works discussed earlier by Kevin Beasley, Elizabeth Catlett, and Robert Colescott, to the color-filled interventions by painters ranging from Aaron Douglas and Mickalene Thomas to Amanda Williams, Tomashi Jackson, Jennifer Packer, and Vaughn Spann, this book contemplates the connections between chromatic consciousness, visuality, and emotion. [When] Jean-François Lyotard writes of color’s challenges and its dismantlement of painting’s never-ending, narrative-driven “plot,” what he evoked is akin to a tidal wave, where aqueous pigments are pushed or flow over art surfaces not merely to ornament them or support acts of storytelling, but to be there, as evanescently blue-green as in Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Daniel in the Lion’s Den, or as brazenly brown as in William H. Johnson’s Nude.
Colorstruck! Painting, Pigment, Affect (Princeton: Princeton University Press) 2026.
