Paragraph with Orange 1962

Date:	1962
Medium:	Oil on canvas
Size inches:	c. 48 x 48
Size cm:	c. 122 x 122
Signature:	Signed on the reverse
Location:	Unknown

I was very proud to go to the Graham Gallery exhibition. It was a group show called "May Festival" and the first real gallery I ever exhibited with. I had shown paintings in the City Center Gallery, there was also the Silvermine credit (Silvermine Guild of Artists, New Canaan, Connecticut, April 26 - May 28, 1964)), I had shown work at the Metropolitan Museum in the employees' cafeteria, but all those things just happened to be. A painting at the Graham Gallery did not just happen to be, it was actually sought out. I was asked to exhibit it by Robert Graham. It was one of my large shelf paintings and I remember there were purple and orange stripes in it. It had a dimension that is strange to me in that it was almost a four foot square. While I made the stretcher I got mixed up in the measurements, for I had planned a six by four foot stretcher, I either ran short of wood or forgot what I had in mind and when I put it together I had to paint something on it, and this was the painting chosen.(excerpt from There's a Cow in Manhattan Part 10).

It was Benny Andrews who I thought was really Benjamin, but he said that he was baptized Benny ... (who) has a way of getting around to galleries and introduced me to Robert Graham, the director of the Graham Gallery on Madison Avenue. Robert said, "Call me Bob," when he visited to see my paintings. He was a tall thin man who looked like the men that worked here on Wall Street, was easy to talk with and able to look at contemporary painting. He liked these paintings that I was doing. The paintings were calligraphic with simple brown and white colors and were all vertical canvases with horizontal lines. I am involved with lined paper, so I painted lined paper, and, with a brush, I write paragraphs on these lines with exciting brush strokes. They are not readable, but have the texture of writing. One, rather large, about fifty inches high, had some bright orange flicked around some unreadable words, as though some teacher had graded a paper of writing. Bob was having a group showing of new painters and decided this painting could be in his gallery show. I call it "Paragraph with Orange." ... Bob Graham's exhibition that was in late June had the first painting that I showed in a gallery. Benny had a painting as well as Dick Miller, an abstract painter whom I knew. ... The exhibit was on the second floor of the Graham Building on Madison Avenue at 71st Street. ... The Graham summer exhibition came down, my painting returned, and Bob's assistant Joan Washburn came here to see more paintings.
(excerpt from Notebook 1996, 2001, 2008).

Robert Graham Gallery, New York

Exhibition date:	May 1962
Works Shown:	Paragraph with Orange 1962