I had assumed that Gene Davis made nothing but stripe paintings. He did not. He began with drawings and Abstract Expressionist paintings and later made collages, micro-paintings, video, neon, and enormous outdoor works. But once he found the stripe in the late 1950s, it became his principal subject.

Subject is the word Davis himself used.

“I have very, very strong subject matter in my work, which is stripes,” he said. “A stripe is just as real as a goddamn flower.”

That gets us closer to the paintings. The stripe was not simply a device for arranging color. It was the thing itself.

When I was a student at Bennington College, Kenneth Noland lived a few miles away in Shaftsbury, Vermont. He had nothing officially to do with the college while I was an undergraduate, but his presence was felt. Artists and critics who came to see him would sometimes turn up at Bennington—Larry Poons, Tony Caro, Clement Greenberg.

When I became a graduate student, Noland taught a course that I took. He was surprisingly practical. He talked about how we arranged our studios and how we dealt with all the things that pulled us away from the work. He was interested in the circumstances of being an artist: how you set things up so that you could keep painting.

Frank Stella did not arrive at the stripe because he liked stripes.

He arrived at it because he was trying to solve a problem in painting.

Frank Stella did not arrive at the stripe because he liked stripes.

He arrived at it because he was trying to solve a problem in painting.

Frank Stella did not arrive at the stripe because he liked stripes.

He arrived at it because he was trying to solve a problem in painting.

When people first encounter Bridget Riley's stripe paintings, they often assume the work is highly calculated. The stripes appear so precise, so controlled, that it is easy to imagine a system determining the outcome.

The reality is more interesting.

Riley was not trying to make a system. She was trying to understand color.

Some artists use stripes as a way to measure space. Some use them as rhythm, structure, pattern, discipline, refusal, or optical vibration. With Morris Louis, the stripe begins somewhere else. It begins with liquid paint, raw canvas, gravity, and a room too small for the scale of what he wanted to make.

After Pat Johanson gave her talk at the Curiosity Forum, I walked her to her car.

She had come with almost nothing. A computer bag, a fanny pack, and the clothes she was wearing. She told me this was how she traveled, whether she was going to a dinner or to a site where she might have to walk through mud, look at drainage, think about water flow, plants, animals, erosion, construction, access, use. The same clothes. The same body. The same attention.

That is what stayed with me. Not just the work, though the work is remarkable, but the way she carried herself in relation to it. She did not seem to arrive anywhere with an idea to impose. She came prepared to look.