Ronnie Landfield has made many paintings without the bands, and has been moving through a variety of different formats for decades now, and there are many that I think are terrific. Also, the bands have become, at times, more architectural and literal in pictures like Butterfly ( For Joan Landfield ), and many others like it. They are used for contrast, to give the push/pull that Hans Hoffman talked about, and often, to create a sense of space. These are timeless characteristics in painting and the visual arts in general, and he distills them well.

When the bands are working, they work beautifully, and as a critic friend of mine once told me: “repeat yourself”. He meant that if you see something good, mine it. Sometimes, I find a picture that doesn’t seem to need the bands, or the bands are holding it back, but in most cases, the long horizontal ones work beautifully. My agreement with David Cohen comes from wanting to see what would happen if Landfield made a concentrated series without the bands, either horizontal or vertical. He can paint, that’s for sure, and those stained and thinly painted lozenge shapes are loaded with painterly virtuosity.

Like Friedl Dzubas, Jack Bush, Darryl Hughto, Ken Noland and others, Ronnie Landfield’s pictorial intelligence is in his ability to simplify and put color next to color on a large scale.

As far as I know, Greenberg never proscribed ( as in forbid ). He was always open to looking and liked to be surprised by new solutions to how good art could be made. Certainly, he could be definitive with his taste and “take”on art, and sometimes this was interpreted as some kind of law or dictum he was making for art.

The most famous example and mis-interpretation of this, is when Greenberg’s writing and thoughts about the flatness of the picture plane, and how it functions in certain types of painting, became translated into a dictum or a prescription of how good non-objective painting had to be made. He was commenting on some very specific types of painting going on at a certain time, that were taking advantage of flat expanses of color, usually stained, but not always, and how this was paving the way for a new kind of painting. He thought some of this type of painting was the best being done at the time – and he put his taste on the line about it.

Finally, I am not so convinced that looking “old fashioned”, is necessarily a bad thing. I’d much rather make old fashioned looking paintings that are good or great, than make paintings that are trying too hard to look up to date.