Nightingale: Color Field Paintings That Anticipated “Warming Stripes”

For Earth Week 2020, I contributed a story on color field paintings and Ed Hawkin’s “Warming Stripes” visualization to the data visualization publication Nightingale:

The reduction of an idea to its basic form in “Warming Stripes” is reminiscent of the Color Field style of abstract painting that emerged in the 1950s and ’60s, with hubs in New York City and Washington, DC. Building off postwar Abstract Expressionism, the Color Field painters stepped away from the gestural movement in work by artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, where the process of painting was very much visible. A Color Field painting pulls the viewer in through its simplified lines and shapes, the focus on the interplay of the colors themselves rather than the hand of the artist.