JOHN T. SPIKE: Art & Antiques: Special Design Issue: Closer Look: Night Light: Karen Gunderson Paints It Black: April 2005

Willem de Kooning once compared the life of a creative artist to a man he had seen at a circus, off by himself, trying to stand on a single finger.  The point was this: No one asked him to do it.  So too artists often change and seek new inspirations without prompting.

Ten years ago Karen Gunderson put aside her signature motif of sun-drenched clouds and turned to making paintings in a single colorless color—black.  It was another approach to infinity, perhaps, only there is a great deal of difference between a soaring sky and a bottomless pit.
           
Black is the absence of light, which is why it’s synonymous with long-legged beasties “that go bump in the night.”  The definition of black in my Funk & Wagnalls dictionary runs: “having no brightness or color, reflecting no light, total darkness”; “gloomy, dismal, forbidding: a black  future.”  Around 1820, Francisco de Goya fell into a mood and covered the walls of his farmhouse with the now-famous pinturas negras, some of the blackest paintings ever conceived.  Closer to home, Ad Reinhardt worked obsessively in the early ‘60s on square paintings colored with imperceptible brushstrokes of indistinguishable shades of (what else?) black.  Very, very gradually, as our eyes adjust, three rows of three squares loom into view.  It was this surprise factor that made the Reinhardt in New York’s Museum of Modern Art a childhood favorite.  Trying to make an “invisible” art, Reinhardt discovered by accident that even “nothingness” has unseen depths.