Chapter 1: Contemporary Stripe Painting and Harry MC

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​Harry MC: The Vertical as a Working Language

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Harry MC has returned to the vertical stripe for nearly five decades. It is less a motif than a working language.

The restriction is useful. Once imagery and narrative fall away, relatively small decisions become very exposed. One stripe is wider than another. One colour appears to push forward while its neighbour recedes. A band may stop short of the top edge. White space can become a narrow pause or open into a much larger interval. The structure stays recognisable, but within it almost everything can move. Earlier paintings often relied on continuous vertical bands. In Measured Intervals, the white spaces between them became increasingly important. They stopped behaving simply as background and began to take on a more active role. That development has continued.

In The Interrupted Stripe, the continuous band is broken into separate passages. The interval that once sat between one stripe and the next begins to enter the stripe itself. The vertical remains, but its continuity is disturbed.

Stacked Interruptions takes this a stage further. The individual marks are horizontal blocks, yet their repeated alignment causes the eye to rebuild vertical columns across the white ground. The stripe is no longer continuous, but the vertical still governs the painting.

In Horizontal is the Prefix to Vertical, the relationship shifts again. A compact horizontal register is painted first, establishing a sequence of colours from which the larger vertical field develops. Something that might normally remain outside the finished work, a test, a palette, a studio note, stays visible within the painting.

In some versions the horizontal register appears on both sides. The colour is compressed at the edges and then allowed to expand through the vertical field between them. These developments matter because they keep reopening the stripe rather than treating it as a settled formula.

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Colour, Place and Fieldwork

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A great deal of Harry’s colour begins outside the studio. Years of fieldwork in Provence have produced thousands of photographs, notes and remembered colour relationships drawn from landscape, architecture, archaeological sites and contemporary art spaces. Bath offers something very different, Georgian stone, softer light and another kind of architectural rhythm. The paintings do not attempt to reproduce those places. What travels back to the studio is usually more fragmentary. An ochre wall beside pale stone. A green shutter against shadow. A sudden dark opening in a bright façade. A colour relationship that stays in the mind long after the place itself has been left behind. That is often enough.

The stripe gives these observations a structure without turning them into pictures. Place remains present, but indirectly. A painting can arise from Provence without depicting Provence.

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Material and Making

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Harry’s practice also remains strongly material. Pigments, grounds, oils, alkyds and different painting surfaces are tested in the studio. Ochres encountered through fieldwork in southern France have become part of a longer investigation into earth colour and how pigment behaves once it is mixed and applied. The paintings sit somewhere between control and touch. The vertical structure may be disciplined, but the surface still depends on physical decisions. Paint has to be mixed. A brush has to be loaded. One colour goes down beside another and sometimes the next decision changes because of what has just happened on the canvas. At large scale those differences become increasingly noticeable. A stripe that looks like a simple graphic unit on a screen becomes something very different when it is several feet high. It occupies part of the viewer’s field of vision and begins to behave almost architecturally.

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Chapter 2: Bridget Riley, Stripes, Colour and Perception

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Any serious account of stripe painting eventually reaches Bridget Riley. Her early black-and-white paintings established her international reputation during the 1960s. Later, colour became increasingly important, and vertical and horizontal bands gave her a controlled structure within which colour relationships could be tested. What remains so striking is how much she can extract from restriction. A sequence of bands appears straightforward until the colours begin to shift against one another. Then the structure becomes much less stable. Rhythm develops. Colours seem to change according to their neighbours. The eye begins moving across a surface that is, of course, completely still. Riley showed just how sensitive repetition can be. The value of her work to later stripe painters is not that it offers a model to copy. It demonstrates that a strict structure can remain visually open. Repetition does not have to become predictable, and order does not have to result in calm. That remains one of the central lessons of stripe painting.

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Chapter 3: Frank Stella and the Physical Fact of Painting

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Frank Stella approached stripes from a very different direction. His early Black Paintings used repeated black bands separated by narrow areas of unpainted canvas. The paintings were controlled and severe, but they were still physically made. Brush marks and small irregularities remain visible. The stripe became both a method and a structure.

Rather than using the canvas as a window into another space, Stella allowed the dimensions of the painting itself to influence the composition. The repeated bands acknowledge the surface, the edge and the shape of the support.

This was important. The stripe was no longer simply an image placed on a painting. It could arise from the physical logic of the painting itself. For later painters, Stella remains an important reference because he made repetition feel fundamental rather than decorative.

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Chapter 4: Gene Davis, Colour and the Vertical Field

 

Gene Davis offers another answer to what stripes can do. From the late 1950s onwards he developed increasingly ambitious paintings made from vertical bands of colour. He became closely associated with the Washington Color School, and by the 1960s the stripe had become central to his work. His paintings can appear highly systematic, but his colour decisions were often intuitive. Davis was interested in what he called colour interval, the effect produced when a colour reappears after a gap, or when one hue is separated from another by a particular sequence. This gives the paintings something close to musical timing. The eye travels across them. A colour seen near one edge may return much later. Similar hues echo one another across the canvas. The painting unfolds rather than presenting itself all at once.Scale plays a large part in this. Some of Davis’s paintings became enormous, large enough that the viewer could no longer comfortably take in the whole sequence at a glance. This is one of the strengths of stripe painting. It can be very ordered while the experience of looking at it remains open.

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Chapter 5: Daniel Buren, Stripes and Place

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With Daniel Buren, the stripe leaves the conventional canvas altogether. In the 1960s Buren adopted a repeated vertical stripe based on striped awning fabric. The width remained constant, and over time the pattern became inseparable from his work. What makes Buren interesting is that the stripe itself is deliberately ordinary. Its consistency allows everything around it to become more noticeable. A wall, a window, a column or the dimensions of a room begin to matter because the repeated stripe gives the eye something constant against which to measure them. The surroundings become part of the work. Buren has used stripes on architecture, windows, public spaces and temporary installations. The stripe moves from being the subject to becoming a device through which the site can be seen differently. For painters interested in architecture and place, that is an important shift. Where a work is seen can alter what the work becomes.

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Chapter 6: Sean Scully, Surface and Memory

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Sean Scully returned weight and touch to the stripe. His paintings are built from horizontal and vertical bands, blocks and interlocking structures, but the geometry is rarely pristine. Paint gathers in layers. Brushwork remains visible. Edges shift.

There is physical resistance in the surface. Scully has often drawn on remembered architecture, walls, travel and light without allowing the paintings to become representational. A wall does not have to be painted literally for something of its weight, colour or proportion to survive in abstraction. This is one reason his work remains so relevant. The stripe can carry memory without becoming an image. It can also remain geometric while still showing the hand that made it. Scully’s paintings demonstrate that structure and emotion do not cancel one another out. The stripe can do both.

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Chapter 7: The Stripe Beyond Painting

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By the end of the twentieth century, stripes had become familiar enough for artists to use them without necessarily belonging to a recognised stripe tradition. Jim Lambie’s Zobop, first made in 1999, takes coloured tape across gallery floors. The stripes follow the shape of the room until the viewer is physically standing inside the pattern. Gerhard Richter came to stripes from another direction entirely. His Strip works were developed digitally from one of his own abstract paintings. The original image was divided into narrow vertical sections, mirrored and repeated until a completely different kind of stripe field emerged. These examples show how difficult it is to speak of one single stripe tradition. A stripe can be painted, printed, taped, projected, generated digitally or built into architecture. What links these very different practices is the ability of repeated bands to organise colour, space and attention.

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Chapter 8: How Stripe Paintings Are Made

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Seen from a distance, stripe paintings can look deceptively straightforward. Come closer and the differences become obvious. The way an edge is made matters. So does the thickness of the paint, the ground beneath it and the amount of surface left visible between one band and the next. Stella’s early black stripes were controlled but still retained evidence of brushwork.

Davis worked intuitively with colour even when the overall structure looked systematic. Buren began with a mechanically produced stripe and used its consistency to reveal the architecture around it. Scully does almost the opposite. The physical act of painting remains visible everywhere. These differences matter because the stripe is never only a shape. A hard edge, a dragged brush, a narrow strip of untouched ground or a slightly uneven layer of pigment can change the whole character of a painting.

Harry MC’s paintings also depend on the relationship between a disciplined structure and decisions made while painting.

Widths alter. Heights shift. White ground remains active between the bands.Increasingly, the interval itself has become  of the subject. In Measured Intervals, space separates the stripes. In The Interrupted Stripe, space enters them. In Stacked Interruptions, the gaps between individual marks become active enough for the viewer to reconstruct the vertical. And in Horizontal is the Prefix to Vertical, the painting begins laterally before moving into its larger vertical structure.

The stripe becomes less a repeated mark and more a way of organising relationships.

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Conclusion: The Stripe as a Contemporary Language

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The history of stripe painting shows how much can be done with very little. Bridget Riley used repeated bands to intensify colour and perception. Frank Stella brought the stripe back to the physical structure of the painting. Gene Davis turned it into a vehicle for colour and rhythm. Daniel Buren carried it into architecture and public space. Sean Scully gave it weight, touch and memory. Later artists have pushed the structure further into installation and digital processes.

None of this has exhausted the stripe. Perhaps that is because a stripe is not really a subject. It is a structure, and a structure can be used again and again for different purposes. For Harry MC, the vertical stripe has provided that continuity for nearly five decades. The questions around it have changed over time. Colour, interval, place, scale, interruption, horizontal and vertical relationships, surface and memory have all entered the work. The more recent paintings make that change particularly visible. A continuous stripe can break apart. A horizontal register can become the starting point for a vertical painting. A collection of small horizontal marks can align strongly enough for the eye to perceive a vertical that is not physically there. The language stays recognisable, but it does not stand still. That may be why the stripe continues to matter. It asks the eye to pay attention to differences that might otherwise seem too small to notice.

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Stripe Painting Today 

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Contemporary stripe painting is not really a revival because the stripe never disappeared. Artists continue to use repeated bands because restriction can sharpen visual decisions. Once there are fewer elements in a painting, every decision becomes more noticeable. Colour, width, edge, spacing, surface and scale all begin to carry more weight. Harry MC’s practice belongs within that continuing territory. His long commitment to the vertical has gradually become an investigation into how much the stripe can change while still remaining itself. That question is still open.

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FAQ: Stripe Painting and Artists Who Paint Stripes

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Who are artists who paint stripes?

Important artists associated with stripe-based work include Bridget Riley, Frank Stella, Gene Davis, Daniel Buren and Sean Scully. Stripes have also appeared in the work of artists including Gerhard Richter and Jim Lambie. Contemporary British painter Harry MC has used vertical stripes and lines as a sustained visual language for nearly five decades.

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What is stripe painting?

Stripe painting uses repeated bands or linear divisions as a primary structure. Artists have used stripes to explore colour, rhythm, perception, repetition, surface, scale and the relationship between painting and space.

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What is a stripe artist?

The term generally describes an artist for whom stripes form a substantial or sustained part of their practice rather than appearing occasionally as pattern or decoration. 

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Why do artists use stripes?

Stripes provide a simple structure in which relatively small differences become highly visible. Changes in colour, width, interval, edge or sequence can alter the rhythm of an entire painting.

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Are stripe paintings Minimalist?

Not necessarily. Stripes appear in Op Art, Colour Field painting, Minimalism, Conceptual art and many forms of contemporary abstraction. The stripe is a structure rather than a single ideology.

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Are stripes still relevant in contemporary painting?

Yes. Their simplicity is one reason they remain useful. Changes in material, spacing, interruption, scale and context can completely alter the way a stripe behaves.

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This essay forms part of Harry MC’s World of Stripes, an ongoing artist-led exploration of the stripe in modern and contemporary painting and of the continuing possibilities of the vertical within Harry’s own practice.