‘I had a conversation with John
Coltrane in 1965 at Club Coronet in
Brooklyn. Coltrane told me how he
equated his sound to sheets; the
sound you hear in his music comes
at you in waves. He catches it when
it comes by, and he’ll grab at as
much of it as he needs. I think that,
in plastic terms, translating from
sound, I was sensing sheets, waves
of light. That’s why I refer to these
paintings as energy fields. I often
thought of them as two poles that
create a magnetic field in which
light trapped... That’s the energy.’
Jack Whitten, 1983
