It is September 1961. Ellsworth Kelly studies a castor bean, one growing in a container on his rooftop in lower Manhattan, perhaps. The personality of this particular plant attracts him. After examining it carefully, he renders one of its leaves in ink on paper. He draws quickly, conscious of both positive and negative space, which he values equally. The result is a single continuous line highlighting the distinctive shape of the leaf. When the work pleases him, the portrait is done—yes, Kelly considers his plant drawings portraits. If the results are unsatisfactory, he begins anew.
The now eighty-nine year old artist no longer recalls where on the page he began this contour drawing. Was it in the middle of one of the seven lobes of the leaf, or at the top, near the paper’s edge? Through the artwork, however, a complete image of the leaf is imprinted in his mind. Visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York this summer can see it, too. “Castor Bean,” on loan from the Centre Pompidou in Paris, is one of approximately eighty drawings on display in the Ellsworth Kelly Plant Drawings exhibition, which runs through September 3, 2012.
