Colored Paper Image XVII (Blue Black Brown)

“Ellsworth Kelly created the twenty-three Colored Paper Images over an eight-month period in 1976, collaborating with Kenneth Tyler, John Koller, and Kathleen Koller at the HMP paper mill. Some fifty colors of pigmented pulp were mixed for use in these editions, as Kelly, John Koller, and Tyler experimented with different coloring agents – powdered pigments, water-base vinyl paints, and dyes – and their effects. Kelly wanted to preserve the quality of certain colored-pulp mixtures that ran during pressing and wanted to stabilize others. To do this, he and Koller altered some colored-pulp mixtures with mordants and varied the degree of press force to adjust the amount of color bleeding. Kelly also experimented with loosely hand-mixing some of the pulps, which, when the pulps were applied on the newly made white pulp base sheets through image molds and then pressed, resulted in mottled color fields.” (Ken Tyler, Tyler Graphics Catalogue Raisonné, 1974-1985, p. 192)