Painter Jack Whitten is interviewed in the Paris Review, as the artist reflects on his works currently on view at Hauser & Wirth in New York, and the process used in creating his works, particularly in his use of units of paint he calls tesserae. “The tesserae, in my mind, is the unit, it’s the thing that makes them. I can build anything I want with the tesserae, using all acrylic paint, built layer by layer by layer until I get the thickness that I want,” he says. “As a rule, I work with a thickness of a quarter of an inch to three sixteenth of an inch. I have ways that I can calculate the thickness that I want. There is a lot more, deeper material than the paint, of course—all the psychological stuff.”
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