Beate Wheeler

Wheeler always insisted her process was autonomic and without specific intention. But as fellow artist Robert Sievert wrote, "One recognizes the craft and skill invested in this work and is held spellbound by the mesmerizing interaction of color, light and form." In fact, her canvases were composed so harmoniously and the color theories she was exposed to initially through Resnick applied so expertly, that it is hard to imagine them arising completely spontaneously. For one thing, there had to be forethought in her deployment of color adjacencies and color mixing, a technique of pairing hues in such a way that the viewer read them as a unified single color rather than two. There was also obvious specificity to her mark making until the transition period of the 1970s, when her color palette lightened and her strokes seemed looser and more impressionistic. (www.beate-wheeler-holst.com)