Chapter 7 Summary and Analysis

Questions that arise within Irwin himself about his line drawings leads him to advance to dots. No matter how muted their image, the lines still read as lines—lines that stand in the way of the viewer's gaze and full experience. Irwin asks himself, "How does one paint a painting without a linear mark?" (p. 87). What Irwin strives to do is create not a color field, but rather a field of color energy. By painstakingly creating red then green dots, all closely aligned, on a ultra-white surface, Irwin is able to create energy. Not pleased with the imperfect edges of his dot paintings, Irwin paints his dots in precise dimensions that form the allusion of a perfect square within the canvas—drawing attention away from the edges.

A second way Irwin deals with imperfect edges is to balloon the...