To See, to Feel

Abstract art is losing some of its edge -- or edges. Dozens of abstract painters have traded in their rulers for spray guns, mops and brushes. Similarly, some of the most severe minimalists indulged in a spot of color. The result was a group of painters loosely classified as "romantic minimalists." The history of Ralph Humphrey, 37, and Dan Christensen, 26, is characteristic. A year ago, they displayed pictures that consisted of properly minimal strips floating on luminous backgrounds. This year, Humphrey and Christensen have moved on to more radiant styles. Since "minimal" no longer applies in either case, "romantic" may be the surviving term.

Humphrey and Christensen do not, of course, depict gallant knights or maidens fair, as did 19th century Romantic painters. But the instinctive way in which their styles have evolved and the relaxed way in which they paint reflect the Romantic definition of the artist as propounded by John Ruskin. "The whole function of the artist," wrote Ruskin, "is to be a seeing and a feeling creature. He may think, in a byway; reason, now and then, when he has nothing better to do; know, such fragments of knowledge as he can gather without stooping, but none of these things are to be his care. The work of his life is to be two-fold only: to see, to feel."

The son of a Youngstown steelworker, Humphrey followed his father into the mills, then quit to study art at Youngstown University and in Paris before coming to New York. A cheery sort, who refuses to wear a beard because it is "too establishment among artists," he began with representational painting. Then, he explains, "I got to a point where objects didn't mean anything any more." Humphrey's canvases of 1964 and 1965 were cold--gray with narrow colored borders. Slowly softer and more vibrant colors began to glow in his works. Humphrey says that the added warmth of his latest pictures probably derives from the arrival, two and a half years ago, of a daughter on whom he dotes.

Dervish Loops. Christensen, on the other hand, is a bachelor with Beatle-length hair, eyes that blaze like a Blake archangel's and a preference for girls in floppy trousers. Son of a Nebraska farmer, truck driver and "you name it," he studied art at the Kansas City Art Institute. He abandoned his geometric-strip canvases because they were "constricting." Now he lays his canvas on the floor and paints or sprays the background on. Next he sprays on the dancing dervish loops and lines that race across them with an industrial airbrush. Finally, he cuts out the picture he wants from the panorama that he has created. He considers titles irrelevant. Red/ Red was called that because he wanted to make a picture redder and more intense than any he had made before. He has done so.

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