For five decades, Pat Steir has actively pursued painting as a conceptual practice. Since
early in her career, Steir has centered her practice on in-depth investigations of various
icons and symbols sourced from traditional Western painting. Sharing a deep affinity
with the nascent discourse of Postmodernism while always charting her own course,
Steir’s deconstructive approach to the painted image has long focused on charged icons
of allegorical painting, such as the rose. These flowers often appear isolated and
crossed out, stripped of their conventional contexts but still conveying their essential
natures. In 1985, Steir turned her focus to another shorthand for natural beauty: the
waterfall. This shift in content witnessed a simultaneous breakthrough in method and
style, as Steir began to fling and pour paint onto the canvas. This forceful incorporation
of gesture brought the artist’s practice into a strong relation with the represented object.
Steir’s “Waterfall Paintings” are the body of work for which she is best known, and they
constitute the primary output of her practice today. In addition to their continuation of
Steir’s iconographic work and their synthesis of gesture and image, these works
demonstrate the artist’s ongoing curiosity of the relation between line and abstraction.

The line has a strong material dimension in Steir’s work, and in the Waterfall Paintings it
is especially connected to movement. Despite the works’ singular and recognizable
style, Steir has maintained that they question the very possibility of abstraction: "It
seems to me, when you put down a line, there is a line. How could that line be abstract?
No matter what else it represents it is always still a line.”1 Thus, the Waterfall Paintings
mark a conceptual accomplishment that Steir’s earlier work gestured toward: the line is
a line, and the waterfall is a waterfall—rendered by actual cascades of paint. This belief
—that a thing is a symbol for itself—is a direct teaching of Buddhism, whose teachings
have been deeply influential to Steir’s practice.

Steir makes these paintings by applying oil paint to canvases while they are oriented
vertically, using thick brushes and slow methodical strokes. This results in dense areas
of pigment (indexes of the contact between brush and canvas) that trail into thin vertical
drips. Steir also flings paint onto the canvases, implying an active horizontal vector of
the compositions. These gestures trace the artist’s movement. After examining
photographs of herself painting, Steir was surprised to find that her arms move along a
trajectory that matches the desired shape of the image: “I always thought [the paint] took
its horizontal form when it hit the canvas, but it takes its form in the air right in front of
the canvas and then it moves to the canvas.”2

In addition to her association with postmodernism, Steir’s work has strong precedents in
histories of Western post-war abstraction. The active nature of her approach to painting
situates her in close proximity to the practice of Jackson Pollock, while the meditative
nature of her compositional process as well as the dense color fields found in nearly all
of her works evokes Mark Rothko’s mature oeuvre.

Steir’s Waterfall Paintings most often have palettes of deep blue, almost back
backgrounds, usually overlaid with white. The application of drips and splatters is made
with varying degrees of force, yielding marks that range from a milky opacity to a thin,
film-like trace. Red on red paintings are uncommon among the Waterfall Paintings,
although the series is punctuated by blue on red, yellow on orange, and certain other
brightly colored compositions.

1. Waldman, Anne. “Pat Steir.” BOMB, Spring, 2003.
2. Ibid.