This painting belongs to James Little’s Slant series, which mobilize horizontally stacked columns of intersecting diagonal colorfields. Little’s Slants use the minimal visual tools of color, shape and pattern to create dynamic perceptual shifts that suggest movement and energy.

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 the 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.

“I’m not cutting edge,” he says. “I’m just trying to stand up next to the great paintings of the past. It’s like building a building. The things that are going to make it stand are the same as they’ve always been. You have to have a solid foundation. I approach painting the same way.”