An art project begun in outrage in 1972 led Buzz Spector to discover what he really wanted to do. In his last undergraduate semester at Southern Illinois University, he came across an Artforum article on Robert Ryman’s all-white paintings. “The claim was being made that these white paintings were art,” Spector says. “I remember thinking, This is a joke. The article was accompanied by hilarious reproductions in black-and-white half tones, in which you can’t even get white.” He decided that if a white painting was art, then so was a gray drawing.
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Spector describes his art before that point as unoriginal. “It was emotionally cold,” he says. “I could draw a still life or a model realistically, but I didn’t have anything to say.” When he sat down to make a gray drawing, he was surprised how difficult it was to get an even tone. Shading one row after another in pencil, he discovered the overlap created a darker area. As he kept drawing, “it stopped being a satire. After 18 hours I finished it and had an epiphany. The paper covered with graphite ended up feeling uncannily spacious rather than like a block of metal. I realized that art didn’t have to be an image–it could be a surface, it could be an atmosphere, it could be brute materiality. These simple shading exercises looked like the reflection of light on water, the bulbous forms of cumulus clouds, piles of rock and rubble–all of them and none of them.” Spector also changed his mind about Ryman. He continued to make gray drawings, with variations, for nine years. His exhibit at Zolla/Lieberman, opening tonight, in part represents his return to earlier work: it includes three gray drawings from 1975 and three recent ones. One early variation involved placing torn edges of paper on top of his sheet, which produced jagged borders between areas of different density. He later achieved a similar look freehand.
