A Summer in Spencertown: Reflections on Ellsworth Kelly and Abstraction
Madeleine Giaconia - February 24, 2023
The author in front of Ellsworth Kelly’s Purple Red Gray Orange (1987) at the Tate Modern Museum in London, UK. Photo by Tristan Baumeister.
In April of 2022, I received an unexpected email while sequestered in on-campus isolation housing with COVID-19. Stir-crazy and subsisting on a diet of bananas and chocolate pudding, I’d feverishly opened my inbox to seek correspondence from the outside world—and was stunned to find I’d received a summer internship offer at Ellsworth Kelly’s studio in Spencertown, New York.
Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015) was one of the most influential artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Over a career that spanned seven decades, he became known as a pioneer of abstract, hard-edge painting. Distinctly shaped panels smoothly coated in bold colors were Kelly’s trademark, but he also worked in printmaking, sculpture, and architectural design. Kelly drew inspiration from nature and architectural motifs, translating complex forms like flowers and stairways into their simplest shapes. His bold canvases project off the wall, intended to provoke prolonged contemplation through their simplicity. In an interview with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, given shortly before his death in 2015, Kelly spoke on the experience of viewing his paintings in exhibitions: “A show… it’s not enough time,” he remarked. “You go to the gallery once, you see it [for] ten minutes or so, then walk on… I think my pictures need time.”
During my internship, I was privileged to have been given what museum-goers could not: three months of this time. It altered my understanding of art (and, dare I say, life?) in ways that I couldn’t have anticipated.
Spencertown, NY. Photo by Madeleine Giaconia.
When summer began, I made my first commute to the studio. Kelly abandoned city life in 1970 to establish a new home base in Spencertown, a hamlet populated by a grand total of 175 people and reachable only by wide-open roads through farmland and woods. As I drove through the picturesque landscape, it wasn't hard to see why Spencertown had been a fruitful source of inspiration for the remainder of Kelly’s life.
When I stepped out of the car, I was struck by how peaceful everything around me felt. The studio, a modern gray stone building, was nestled amid verdant grass and wildflowers. It was industrial yet somehow perfectly at one with the surrounding environment. Thick trees blocked the studio from the rarely-traveled road, obscuring any noise from the outside world. In the distance, a towering white totem—one of Kelly’s sculptures—loomed in the lawn, united with the stillness of the summer air.
The sense of serenity continued inside the studio, an airy, open space with broad windows that looked out over a pond and lush backyard. I was greeted warmly by my supervisor, who introduced me to the staff. Everyone knew Ellsworth when he was alive. They all speak of him as though he’s still there.
I was taken on a tour through the storage rooms, which were filled to the brim with drawers of prints that had lacked a proper inventory for years. Carefully removing the hundreds of prints from storage, logging them, and assessing their condition became one of my tasks as an intern. The studio also holds an archive dedicated to books, auction catalogs, museum records, and Kelly’s personal correspondence. I would later spend hours in the library, engrossed in overflowing files of email chains and handwritten notes between Kelly and his colleagues.
But I was most struck by Kelly’s workspace, where he created hundreds of paintings over his 45 years in Spencertown. His workbench has been left untouched since the day he died. Paint brushes still rest in cups where he put them down, and a blank canvas is primed on the color-splattered wall. I didn’t spend much time in that room—no one really did—but every time I walked through it, some part of me expected to see Kelly mixing paints, finally ready to begin work on the empty canvas.
As an aspiring historian of modern art, receiving the opportunity to work at the studio where Kelly had produced monumental abstract works was invaluable to me. Abstraction can be hard to digest—to some, its simple forms and lack of “realistic” details indicate a lower degree of artistic skill, or lack of meaning. Indeed, I confess to growing up steeped in the same beliefs, as my perception of art was shaped by my father’s passion for eighteenth-century decorative arts and figurative paintings, abstraction’s utter opposite. Although studying modern and contemporary art in college had already altered my views on abstraction before I landed the studio internship, I gained a new level of understanding as I became immersed in Kelly’s work. Handling prints and reading the handwritten notes Kelly scrawled on the back—often marking the lack of distance he’d placed between shapes in a composition, or noting that he didn’t like a color’s shade—I came to understand the high degree of care, technique, and intentionality that went into each piece.
Left: Ellsworth Kelly, “Yellow Piece,” 1966, oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Right: Ellsworth Kelly, “Spectrum IX,” 2014, oil on canvas, Matthew Marks Gallery.
Over the course of the summer, Kelly’s careful reflections on the value of the simplest form seemed to bleed from his work into my own mind. When I look back on my time in Spencertown, the memories that stand out to me are not monumental; they’re smaller moments within a larger peace. I remember lying on a deck in the warm sun, laughing with my coworkers as we took our lunch break by the pond. I once impulsively pulled over on the side of the road to buy fresh peaches and cookies from a farmstand. I shamelessly admit to (alone in my car) gleefully exclaiming, “Cows!” when I drove by the colossal herd in a field that flanked one of the roads on my route. Small things felt more precious. Perhaps there’s something in the way that, just as Kelly diluted life’s complex forms into their base shapes, I gained a greater appreciation for the simple instances of beauty in my own surroundings.
Now, when I sit in front of Kelly’s paintings in a museum, the deceptively simple expanses of color draw me in and make me pause for a moment—not to contemplate any intricate details or hidden meaning, but to simply be still. And for a moment, I return to the little road where cars never passed, the sun-dappled woods that hid the studio from the outside world, the big room with Ellsworth’s dirty paint brushes that his loved ones haven’t moved after seven years. Frozen in time, peaceful, quiet—as I hope all those who sit before his paintings take a moment to be.
Written in honor of Ellsworth Kelly’s centennial year, 2023.
Interview Referenced:
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, “Ellsworth Kelly on Abstraction,” 2015, linked here.
