"The simple paintings of 1958-9 were made then with the thought that cutting out everything else but pigment on ground would let color tell the whole story. I found images that floated, rested heavily, hung, nudged, bumped, touched, hovered in vast voids of separation, were many, were few, isolated, single, alone. Today these painting are still quiescent, bound by the gravity that makes bodies in orbit hang in a stillness where the slowest movement marks the space from one to another. The fiction of writing about my own work is possible perhaps because it is at a distance of seventeen years and this is the first time I have tried giving any explanation.
I do want to give a hint of what followed. From 1962, occasionally, and for good in 1965, I got over the inborn American distaste for shape consciousness and the fear that drawing could be corny, which caused us to use anything but the traditional means to paint on the canvas. I had made the simple paintings by applying the paint with rags. Quitting the myth that a painter must be innocent of the artifice of art freed me of the limits and rules I had made for myself for color and field. Now I could make a screwy shape, even a line! Color, yes! Field, yes! Elaborate shapes, lateral movements, changing speeds, changing speeds, multiple rhythms (once more) Yes! Anything, yes! And withal, these new paintings are simple and direct."
- RAY PARKER, 1975
Ronald Alley, Catalogue of The Tate Gallery’s Collection of Modern Art, other than works by British Artists, (The Tate Gallery, London, in association with Sotheby Parke Bernet Publications, 1981), p.582