LAWRENCE LARRY POONS

;;
;;
;;
;;
;;
;;
;;
;;
;;;
;;
o;;
;;
;;
o;;
;;
;;
o;;
;;;.;
;
.;
;.;
;.;
;.;
;.;
;.;
;.;
;.;
;;
;;
o;;
;;
;;
;;
;;
;;
;;
;;;LAWRENCE LARRY POONS

I decided to write about Lawrence Poons due to fact he was an American and I want to write about someone who contributed to the art world from America. Secondly, I was intrigued about how Larry Poons used color to make his paintings have a sense of movement to the naked eye. Relying on how our brains work and how our eyes process information when stared at for a long period of time was an ingenious way manipulating our natural senses. Lawrence Poons better known as Larry Poons was born October 1, 1937 in Tokyo, Japan. He is mostly known for his abstract paintings that focused on optical art which he gained fame in America around the 1960s over his paintings of dots. For Larry Poons painting was not his first choice. He was enrolled in college in New England at the Conservatory of Music back in 1955 – 1957 with the intent to be a professional musician.
By 1959 he changed his major and enrolled in the School of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and also studied at the Art Students League of New York. His rise to fame came in the 1960s with paintings of circles and ovals on solid, often brilliantly colored, backgrounds. He had his first New York exhibit at the Green Gallery in 1963 and has enjoyed widespread artistic and critical respect ever since. These paintings conveyed a sense of movement which was categorized as optical art. By the mid sixties, Larry Poons moved away from optical art a more scientific aspect of his work and towards a more poetic and traditionally direction. I choose to write about one of Larry Poons web works called “Sunnyside Switch”. In Sunnyside Switch, the viewer still senses an ordered system, as a kind of invisible structure seems to hold dot motifs suspended on a diagonal grid over the continuous color plane. He used the term

References: Griffith, Laura Susan, Larry Poons and the Evolution of Stylistic Diametrics, Cleveland, Ohio, Department of Art History, Case Western Reserve University, 1983. Moffett, Kenworth, Larry Poons, Paintings, 1971-1981, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 1981. Web Exhibits