Cadman's Blue

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Although he socialized with such famous abstract expressionist artists as Lee Krasner and Robert Motherwell, Doug Ohlson creates paintings that are restrained and geometric in nature. His Color Field canvases are inspired by the saturated swaths of open sky and flat land in Iowa, where he was born during the Great Depression. As New York Times art critic Roberta Smith has observed, “The staple of his formal vocabulary was repeating vertical bars that seemed, increasingly, to levitate before clouds of vibrant contrasting color.” Ohlson studied under the minimalist artist Tony Smith at Hunter College in New York, where he himself started teaching in 1964.