Chapter 1: Contemporary Stripe Painting – Harry MC and the Living Tradition

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1.1 Harry MC: Stripes as Colour, Place, and Memory

​Harry MC is a British abstract painter whose practice over nearly five decades has been devoted to the stripe as a primary visual and conceptual element. Working from a Georgian townhouse studio in Bath and conducting extensive fieldwork in Provence, he creates large-scale oil paintings composed of vertical bands of colour that capture what he describes as “a conversation between colour and place.” Unlike some minimalist predecessors who sought to eliminate the personal hand, Harry embraces materiality and memory within the stripe format. He prepares many of his own paints from natural earth pigments sourced from historic ochre quarries in Provence, meaning each stripe carries geological and geographical specificity. As he explains elsewhere on his site, “the stripes carry the marks of how they were made – and that’s where their energy lies.” This attention to pigment, brush-drag and surface distinguishes his work from the mechanical precision of earlier stripe painters, introducing a phenomenological dimension where each vertical band becomes a record of time, gesture and encounter.

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Structure and Rhythm
Harry MC's stripe compositions typically employ a fixed geometric structure, columns of bands running vertically across the canvas, sometimes of equal width, sometimes varied. Yet within that scaffold, everything shifts, colour transitions, brushwork varies, pigment thickness modulates, edges breathe. "The geometry stays fixed, but the colour and rhythm keep shifting," he notes. "It's a way of staying steady while everything else moves." This tension between constancy and flux animates the work, creating what viewers describe as a meditative yet dynamic visual experience.

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Colour as Experience

Where Op Art stripe painters like Bridget Riley emphasized optical phenomena and Minimalists like Frank Stella insisted on literal objecthood, Harry MC positions colour as experiential memory. His palette draws from the honey-toned stone of Bath's Georgian architecture, the sun-bleached ochres of Provence, and the shifting Mediterranean light he encounters during research trips. Each stripe functions as "a small record of time and perception", less an exercise in retinal stimulation than an investigation of how colour behaviours in relation to place, light, and personal history.

His recent series "Landscapes of Provence" exemplifies this approach. These works translate field research at sites like Château La Coste and the hilltop village of Lacoste into rhythmic sequences of vertical bands. The paintings don't depict these locations representationally; rather, they distil sensory experience into chromatic structure. Terracotta reds recall sun-warmed rooftops, dusty ochres evoke quarry pigments, and deep ultramarines compress the unbroken Mediterranean sky into vertical measure. The stripe becomes a container for phenomenological data—what Provence feels like, not what it looks like.

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Material Practice
Harry MC's studio functions as what he calls a "colour laboratory." He sources raw pigments, tests binding mediums, and documents how different earth colours behave when ground, mixed, and applied. This hands-on material investigation connects him to pre-industrial painting traditions while situating his practice firmly in contemporary concerns about authenticity, process, and the ecology of making. During visits to the ochre region around Roussillon in Provence, he collects naturally sourced pigments from historic quarries, the same deposits that supplied artists for centuries. Back in Bath, these materials are folded into his stripe paintings, creating passages where the landscape literally enters the work. The dry-edged yellows and warm earth tones carry, as he puts it, "a trace of the south." This material specificity counters the dematerialized aesthetics of much contemporary digital culture, asserting that painting remains a physical act rooted in substance and place.

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Gesture Within System
Though Harry MC works within a rigorous format of repeated vertical bands, he explicitly rejects the idea of the stripe as mechanical or impersonal. His bands retain evidence of the hand: visible brush marks, layered applications, tonal variations within a single stripe, and slight irregularities where one colour meets another. In places, a stripe will creep over its neighbour; elsewhere, an under-layer will ghost through. These micro-variations are where, in his words, "the paintings breathe." This approach situates him between the austere literalism of 1960s Minimalism and the expressive brushwork of painters like Sean Scully. Harry's stripes are neither purely systematic nor freely gestural—they occupy a productive middle ground where discipline enables rather than constrains the hand. Each vertical band is both structural module and unique painterly event.

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Position in the Stripe Painting Continuum
Harry MC's work synthesizes and extends multiple lineages within stripe painting:

From Bridget Riley: the focus on rhythm, optical vibration, and carefully calibrated colour sequences, but diverging toward material specificity and place-based memory rather than pure perceptual experiment.

From Gene Davis: the all-over field of multicoloured vertical stripes creating immersive environments, but with explicit attention to pigment source and the stripe as material trace rather than just colour interval.

From Sean Scully: the painterly handling, layered surfaces, and stripes as carriers of emotion, but maintaining more consistent geometric discipline and vertical orientation.

From Daniel Buren: the awareness that stripes always exist in relation to context and site, but engaging architecture and landscape as inspiration rather than institutional critique.

In essence, Harry MC represents a contemporary iteration of the stripe painting tradition: less iconoclast than synthesizer, mining the motif for new relationships between colour and place, making and mark-making, system and sensation, history and present practice.

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Key Works and Projects
Harry MC's "World of Stripes" is an ongoing research project that positions his practice within the broader lineage of artists who paint stripes. It combines studio work, field research, pigment experiments, and critical writing. His website describes it as an investigation that "turns colour into structure and light into geometry."

Recent bodies of work include:

• "Landscapes of Provence" – Large-scale stripe paintings derived from light, architecture, and stone encountered at sites including Lacoste, the Luberon valley, and Château La Coste (where he studied Sean Scully's monumental "Wall of Light Cubed" sculpture among the vineyards).

• "Travels in Colour & Stripes" – A series tracking how colour and pattern behave in different geographical and architectural contexts, from Miami and Athens to Rome and southern France, with findings translated back into studio stripe compositions.

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Critical Significance

Harry MC's practice demonstrates several crucial developments in contemporary stripe painting:

The stripe as lived index: By embedding stripes in pigment-making, travel, and architectural encounter, the motif becomes richer than purely formal or optical experiment. Each stripe carries information about its origins—geological, geographical, temporal.

Hand and system in dialogue: Rather than eliminating the personal gesture (as early Minimalists advocated), Harry shows how the hand can operate productively within systematic structures, creating what critic might call "vernacular geometry."

Abstraction grounded in place: His work challenges the notion that abstraction must sever itself from location and memory. These stripe paintings are abstract in composition but deeply rooted in specific sites and materials.

Continuity and renewal: Harry MC proves that even a thoroughly explored motif like the stripe still contains "new possibilities" (as he writes on his site). By focusing on colour as experience and material as carrier of place, he opens pathways for stripe painting's continued relevance.

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1.2 Other Contemporary Artists Who Paint Stripes

Harry MC’s work sits alongside a small but significant group of contemporary painters who continue to find vitality in the stripe format:

Sean Scully (b. 1945, Irish-American) remains one of the most internationally prominent living stripe painter. His large-scale works feature rough-edged, painterly bands often organized in grid-like structures or layered as if one striped canvas has been placed atop another. Scully's stripes are emphatically physical—thick with paint, weathered, emotionally resonant.

Mary Heilmann (b. 1940, American) incorporates stripes into compositions that blend geometric abstraction with a loose, almost casual handling. Her work often references Californian surf culture, 1960s psychedelia, and West Coast light. Tomma Abts (b. 1967, German, working in London) occasionally employs stripe-like bands within her rigorously composed small-scale paintings. Her work is process-driven, built through repeated adjustments and overpainting until a complex spatial structure emerges.

These artists, along with Harry MC, prove that stripe painting in the 21st century is not mere historical reenactment but an active investigation of colour, material, space, and perception. The stripe remains a generative structure precisely because of its simplicity, it provides enough constraint to focus inquiry while allowing infinite variation in execution, palette, scale, and context.

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Chapter 2: Stripes, Perception, and Op Art – Bridget Riley's Optical Explorations

​To understand contemporary stripe painting, we must trace its roots through the revolutionary work of the 1960s and 70s. Bridget Riley stands as the most celebrated pioneer of stripe-based Op Art, using repeated lines and bands to create vivid optical vibrations that probe the very act of seeing.

Riley's early black-and-white compositions, such as Fall (1963), rendered viewers' eyes "unstable" with undulating stripes and high-contrast patterns. These works appeared in the landmark 1965 exhibition The Responsive Eye at MoMA, introducing Op Art to a broad public. While the dizzying illusions impressed viewers, Riley's deeper interest lay in investigating how perception links to emotion. For Riley, stripes were not visual tricks but tools to examine the connection between seeing and feeling.

By the late 1960s, having established the optical power of monochrome stripes, Riley turned to colour. She spent two years studying Georges Seurat's colour theory, learning how adjacent hues interact. To isolate colour effects, she adopted vertical stripes as her primary format around 1970, finding them the most "fundamentally stable" structure on which to layer chromatic experiments. The uniform geometry provided a neutral scaffold that allowed colour relationships to dominate. Repetition compelled viewers to "look carefully and closely," training the eye to register subtle interactions.

Riley's mature stripe paintings of the 1970s–80s deploy bands of varying colour and width to create chromatic "vibration." Often colour within a single stripe subtly gradates, producing seamless transitions and sensations of movement. Works like Orient IV (1970) and her "Egyptian palette" series (inspired by a 1980–81 Egypt trip) use carefully sequenced colours that evoke gentle pulsing or undulating waves. Critics often describe these paintings in musical terms—appropriately, as Riley herself said, "The music of colour, that's what I want."

Riley resisted treating Op Art as mere spectacle. Even as her stripe paintings pulse with motion, they remain grounded in rigorous research and method. Her use of stripes exemplifies how a simple device can yield complex perceptual and philosophical questions: What is the relationship between an external pattern and our internal sensation of movement? How do subtle hue shifts trigger emotional responses?

Riley's stripe paintings thus represent a key theme in this study: the stripe as phenomenological instrument. By eliminating figurative content, she invites viewers to experience pure seeing—a direct encounter with colour, light, and afterimage that aligns with mid-century interests in the psychology of perception and Gestalt theories of vision.

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Chapter 3: Minimalist Aesthetics – Frank Stella and the "Necessity" of Stripes

​If Op Art used stripes to animate vision, Minimalist painters used them to discipline it—to turn painting into an object of literal, almost impersonal presence. Frank Stella's early 1960s stripe paintings were foundational for Minimalism, embodying his famous maxim: "What you see is what you see."

For Stella, stripes were not symbols or images of anything; they were simply results of paint applied methodically to a flat surface. In his 1959 MoMA debut statement, Stella declared he had "found it necessary to paint stripes" and that "there is nothing else in his painting." He renounced expression and symbolism: "Frank Stella's painting is not symbolic. His stripes are the paths of brush on canvas. These paths lead only into painting."

Stella's Black Paintings (1958–59) consist of concentric bands of black enamel separated by thin pinstripes of unpainted canvas. Works like The Marriage of Reason and Squalor II (1959) confront viewers with symmetrical stripe patterns emphasizing flatness and the canvas edge. The composition is nothing more than repeated stripes echoing the rectangular format. Stella achieved self-referential purity: the content is simply the painting's own format and the process of its making.

Fellow artist Carl Andre summarized Stella's breakthrough: "His stripes are the paths of the brush on canvas"—literally traces of the painting process itself. Stella turned the stripe into an index of action, a record of brush movement. This was a radical departure from Abstract Expressionism's emotionally loaded gestures; Stella's stripes were anti-expressive, anti-illusionistic, embodying "literalism" in painting.

The critical reception was significant. Stella's inclusion in MoMA's Sixteen Americans at age 23 signalled a new generation challenging 1950s painterly trends. His stripes heralded the end of subjective abstraction and the start of something cooler and more cerebral. Art historian Michael Fried connected Stella's work to "objecthood"—a painting that simply is, confronting the viewer's space rather than representing something.

It's important to note that Stella built on modernist precedents. Barnett Newman's "zip" paintings predated Stella by a decade—single vertical bands running the length of monochrome canvases, as in Onement I (1948) or Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1951). Newman saw these stripes as carriers of metaphysical meaning, evoking the "sublime." Stella stripped away Newman's spiritual rhetoric, making the stripe entirely literal and self-referential. He turned Newman's exalted zip into a mundane, repetitive task—a "path of the brush"—thereby demystifying abstract art.

Stella's stripe paintings influenced not only painters but sculptors and architects in the minimalist vein, who adopted repetition and seriality as guiding principles. His work opened doors to seeing stripes as modular units that could be reproduced, varied, or even parodied—a point not lost on postmodern artists.

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Chapter 4: Colour, Rhythm, and Repetition – Gene Davis and the Washington Colour School

​While Stella eliminated narrative from stripes in New York, Gene Davis in Washington, D.C. embraced stripes to exalt pure colour and rhythm. His "parade of brightly coloured, edge-to-edge stripes" became his trademark in the 1960s. Unlike Stella's austere black bands, Davis's stripes danced with dozens of hues—joyful sequences of pinks, blues, yellows, and blacks, each stripe usually just an inch or two wide but collectively spanning canvases sometimes over 20 feet long.

Davis treated stripes almost as musical notes, composing varied sequences to create "colour interval", the visual equivalent of rhythm and melody. His approach was less about reduction to fundamental truth and more about maximizing colour's emotional and optical impact through calibrated repetition.

Davis came to prominence with works like Black Grey Beat (1964) and Hot Beat (1964)—upright canvases filled with vertical stripes of alternating colours. He wanted each painting to be "a world into which one could enter and stroll around visually." Standing before a Davis canvas, the viewer experiences endless progression—stripes seem to extend beyond the frame, and one's eye wanders from stripe to stripe, savouring each colour contrast or harmony.

In 1962, Davis systematized his method by using the width of masking tape (about 1 inch) as the module for stripes, often not planning more than a few stripes in advance, allowing intuition to guide his next colour choice. As he quipped, "Sometimes I simply use the colour I have most of and worry about getting out of trouble later." This improvisational aspect gave his striped compositions lively unpredictability within overall order.

The Washington Colour School was an offshoot of the larger Colour Field movement, seeking to move beyond Abstract Expressionist ‘brushiness’ into flat areas of colour that could evoke direct sensory and emotional responses. Davis, along with Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, participated in Clement Greenberg's narrative of post-painterly abstraction. In 1964, Greenberg included Davis in Post-Painterly Abstraction in Los Angeles, signalling critical endorsement.

Davis's method differed from peers in embracing multiplicity of colour—where Louis might pour a few rivulets of pigment and Noland paint a single target, Davis orchestrated an entire spectrum across his canvas, earning him reputation as a "colour virtuoso."

In 1972, Davis created Franklin's Footpath, an outdoor painting of brightly coloured stripes running 414 feet along a Philadelphia street to the Museum of Art—billed at the time as the "world's largest painting." It transformed public space into a striped environment, literally a path of colour that people could walk on. This playful triumph showed the stripe's power beyond the canvas and anticipated later site-specific stripe works.

Davis imbued his stripes with optimistic character linked to their verticality. He predominantly painted vertical stripes, and their upward orientation felt modern, forward-looking, unburdened by past conventions. As Davis noted of the 1960s zeitgeist: "There was something… that went through the '60s. It was an exciting period. The Kennedy era, optimism was in the air…"

Gene Davis and his Washington colleagues demonstrated the lyrical potential of stripes. Far from Stella's cold execution, Davis's stripes were "undulating with rhythm and unexpected pattern." Through varying stripe width, he introduced syncopation; through colour sequencing, he created chords or dissonances. The guiding principle remained that colour itself is the content, and stripes served as the most direct delivery system for colour—much as a musical staff delivers notes in sequence.

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Chapter 5: Stripes as Concept and Context – Daniel Buren's In Situ Interventions

​If Riley's stripes were about perception and Stella's about painting's essence, Daniel Buren's stripes have been about context, power, and the very definition of art. The French artist (born 1938) adopted the vertical stripe as his exclusive motif starting in the mid-1960s, turning it into one of contemporary art's most recognizable signatures.

His standard format—alternating white and coloured vertical stripes, each precisely 8.7 cm wide—originated from a chance discovery of awning fabric in a Paris market in 1965. Buren co-opted this mundane striped canvas and began using it as the basis for paintings and posters. The ready-made stripe pattern appealed to him as a "zero degree" of painting, a neutral ground carrying no imagery and minimal expression. By pasting these striped papers around the city and in galleries, Buren effectively erased the personal "hand" of the artist. As he put it, he wanted to "paint nothing," so that the context of display would become everything.

Buren's stripes quickly took on a conceptual and critical edge. In 1967–68, he formed the short-lived BMPT group, which sought to purge painting of narrative and composition. For Buren, the 8.7 cm vertical stripe was the perfect vehicle for this reduction. He has maintained this exact width for decades, to the point that the stripe motif itself becomes a kind of logo. But Buren leverages that familiarity to probe questions of context: where is a work displayed, and how does that affect its meaning?

His striped works are almost always in situ—designed for specific sites and often temporary. By applying stripes to architecture, banners, columns, and windows, he forces viewers to notice surroundings anew. As the Guggenheim notes, Buren used stripes to reveal characteristics of the site where pieces were displayed, offering societal critiques and showing that art can happen anywhere. The stripes themselves are deliberately banal; they direct attention away from themselves and toward the space they inhabit.

Crucially, Buren argues that no exhibition space is neutral. Every museum, gallery, or public square carries ideological baggage. His striped interventions aim to highlight the lack of phenomenological neutrality in exhibition spaces. A famous 1968 action saw Buren hire sandwich-men to walk through Paris carrying placards of his stripe pattern, with no text or image—transforming advertising mediums into moving stripe paintings. Observers were puzzled: what were these stripes selling? Nothing—or rather, awareness of the city itself.

Perhaps Buren's most famous work is "Les Deux Plateaux" (1985–86), commonly called Buren's Columns, in the Palais-Royal courtyard in Paris. He installed a grid of 260 truncated columns of various heights, all painted with black-and-white vertical stripes. The work literally inhabits and alters public space. The striped columns create dialogue between 17th-century classical architecture and modern pattern. Initially controversial, this installation is now beloved and inseparable from its site—a perfect example of site-specific stripe art.

The consistency of Buren's 8.7 cm stripe functions as a form of branding—the pattern has become so identified with him that one writer speaks of "Buren-the-brand," a "semiotic machine" perpetuating his signature look. Buren might not shy from that; he once said, "the site prompts the work," implying that the content of stripes is simply to echo and activate the site.

Buren's intellectual underpinnings draw on post-structuralist thought—the idea that meaning is not fixed but emerges in context and through differences. His stripes, alternating white and colour, are a play of differences; their meaning arises in how they interact with environments and how viewers experience that. Buren turned the stripe into meta-artwork: it is art about art's placement.