Infinity Field, Lefkada Series

In 1950, the young Abstract Expressionist Theodoros Stamos was invited to teach painting and drawing at Black Mountain College’s summer session. The natural grandeur of the Blue Ridge Mountains moved Stamos, a member of the influential New York art circle known as the Irascibles, to abandon his free-form imagery for paintings that explored the expressive power of color. Executed several decades after his short stint at the college, this work reveals Stamos’ embrace of chromatic expanse—a field of color pierced, in this example, by sinuous narrow lines. Inspired by the Greek isle for which the series is named and where Stamos lived in later years, Infinity Field’s palette of cool blue and green hues also references the surrounding Ionian Sea.