Robert Ryman Badger K

In her newest offering, entitled ‘Robert Ryman: Used Paint’, Suzanne Hudson delves into the career of world famous artist Robert Ryman Badger k, from the early paintings he made during the fifties, to some of the works displayed in his most recent exhibits. Ryman’s white, textured paintings have made him a star in the art world, with critics and art lovers alike admiring his return to the most elemental form of painting and his defiance of conventional methods.

Within this book, Hudson closely examines a wide selection of Ryman’s work, including some of his less well known pieces, as well as several of his most popular. She maintains that Robert Ryman Badger k is the type of artist that uses the act of painting as a way in which to explore his own belief system and ideas about the visual world. Hudson goes on to argue that the artist’s approach to his work, which was to learn by doing, was what set him apart from many of the other second generation minimalists, expressionists and conceptualists.

From the beginning of his career, Ryman rejected conventional wisdom and chose to teach himself, rather than receive formal art training. His first experiments with a paint brush and canvas took place during the fifties when he was working in the Modern Museum of Art as a guard. Hudson believes that it was this daily exposure to the work of various modern artists that inspired Robert Ryman Badger k to pick up a paintbrush. The author even speculates whether it was the white walls of the MOMA which sparked Ryman’s obsession with the colour white. The implication that it was Ryman’s external environment which initiated his interest in art seems to fit, as many other MOMA employees went onto have great careers in the art world, including Dan Flavin, Lucy Lippard and Sol LeWitt.

Hudson named a number of the chapters in her book after the basic features of Ryman’s paintings – examples include ‘Primer’, ‘Edge’ and ‘Paint’, and in each of these chapters, she explores how Ryman has experimented with these features over the course of his career. A running argument which can be found throughout the entire book is that Ryman never truly finished any of his paintings, but that instead, every piece was a question which was only answerable by examining the next painting which he made in