Kenneth Noland — American Artist born on April 10, 1924,

Kenneth Noland was an American abstract painter. He was one of the best-known American Color Field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was thought of as a minimalist painter. Noland helped establish the Washington Color School movement. In 1977, he was honored by a major retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York that then traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. and Ohio's Toledo Museum of Art in 1978. In 2006, Noland's Stripe Paintings were exhibited at the Tate in London... (wikipedia)

For me context is the key - from that comes the understanding of everything.
I think of painting without subject matter as music without words.
I met David Smith through my former wife, Cornelia, who'd studied with him.
With artists of my own generation there was at first no group identity - and never a clique.
As time goes on, I realize more and more that, beginning in the early 30's, David Smith began setting the precedent for what was to come later for many of us.