7th Avenue belongs to James Little’s series of Slant paintings, which mobilize horizontal columns of intersecting diagonal color fields. Here, we see alternating slanted blocks of muted blue, purple and green hues. Little’s Slants use the minimal visual tools of color, shape and pattern to create dynamic perceptual shifts that suggest movement and energy. Though his works are abstract, Little often gives them titles that suggest the presence of subject matter. In this case, the title 7th Avenue suggests the dynamism of a city street in New York City, where Little lives and works.

The Slant series is unique among Little’s overall oeuvre, and yet is a definitive representation of the artist’s distinctive abstract aesthetic language, which is rooted in geometric shapes and patterns, flat surfaces, and emotive color relationships.

The Slant series is also part of a larger series of paintings Little makes by layering raw, handmade pigments on canvas. Little creates these works slowly, applying multiple layers of pigment with small rollers until he achieves the desired purity of his handcrafted hues. It is important to Little that the painting is allowed to express small imperfections on the surface, such as scratches, raised ridges between the colorfield, or detritus encased in the paint, which serve to show the human presence of the artist's hand.

The colors in the work shift dramatically according to the lighting, seeming to almost soak up the light in a bright space, and seeming in low light to glow.

While developing his unique position within contemporary abstraction, Little has devoted decades to rigorous academic study of color theory, pictorial design, and painting techniques. His practice embodies the complementary forces of simplicity and complexity.

Most painters paint with wet mediums that are made by mixing a dry pigment (think ground umber) with a wet binder (such as linseed oil). The pigment carries the color, while the binder suspends that color in a form that can be transferred onto a surface using a brush or other painting implement. There are some painters, however, who skip the binder and paint directly with the dry pigment. You can simply apply the dry pigment to a surface then coat it with some kind of clear sealer.

Raw pigment gives the painter more control over aesthetic issues. Raw pigments create a much more translucent layer than wet paint, which can be helpful for painters experimenting with underpainting effects and painters who are looking for different ways for their colors to react with light, and with each other. Raw pigments also create a texture that is much more earthy and organic looking than the smooth surface created by wet paint.

As a painter who wants as much control as possible over his materials and paintings, James Little is famous for hand making his own mediums. One way he achieves this is to paint with dry pigments; another way is to manufacture his own encaustics, by suspending his pigments in a melted wax binder.