Dan Christensen: The Stain Paintings, 1976-1988

"Dan Christensen: The Stain Paintings" is a catalogue that accompanied the 2011 exhibition at Spanierman Modern gallery in New York. The catalogue features the vibrant and poetic group of abstract paintings created by Dan Christensen (1942-2007), in which the staining of the canvas played a central role. Encompassing wide-ranging and innovative techniques, these color-soaked paintings, with their skeletal, skittish calligraphic lines and unusual harmonies of shape and tone, exude the artist's pleasure and passion in the act of painting during a particularly joyous time in his life. This catalogue is 32-pages, including color illustrations of the eighteen works in the show and an essay by Lisa N. Peters, Ph.D.. The noted critic Clement Greenberg stated in 1990: "Dan Christensen is one of the painters on whom the course of American art depends." Indeed, known as a painter's painter throughout his career, Christensen relentlessly explored unconventional tools and innovative ways of treating pictorial space, expanding the limits, range, and possibilities of paint and form through both systematic and spontaneous methods. As in his other works, in his stains, Dan Christensen experimented with new pigments and techniques, but instead of the paint thickeners and extenders he had used in his "slabs" of the early 1970s, he turned to recently developed acrylics that could be thinned to the consistency of watercolor washes and combined with a "tension breaker" that enabled the paints to disperse readily, penetrating into the canvas. To create these works, Christensen stapled unstretched canvases to a carpeted floor. He then rolled his paint to produce an overall ground, sometimes laying colors on top of each other to produce desired hues. Then using a stick, brush, or turkey baster, he created the calligraphic "drawing," or framework of a piece. He finished his images by pouring paint around this framework and manipulating it further.