SFX: Fade up music, playful, like looking into clues to solve a mystery 

ROBERTS: Please don’t step on it! (laughs) 

NARRATOR: Sometimes great ideas come from accidents. Like with this painting. Curator Sarah Roberts can give us some intel on it. 

ROBERTS: Ellsworth has in his studio a little kind of model that he made out of a series of thin pieces of cardboard painted in different colors. They were sitting on top of his desk. And at one point one of them slipped down so that it was laying flat on the surface, and the other one was still standing up at a right angle to it. And he started thinking about what it would mean to make a painting with this kind of L-shaped structure.  

WALTERS: Ellsworth does a lot of experimenting. 

NARRATOR: That’s Kelly’s studio manager, Nick Walters. He’s been working with the artist for more than twenty years. 

WALTERS: He still likes to pick up paint and mix paint and mix color. And just enjoy color in a way that maybe people would say like a kid does. 

ROBERTS: If you stand back and let your eyes look for subtle shifts in the color tone, you can start to see the red bouncing off the blue a bit. There’s this whole play of space and perception that goes on with a very simple juxtaposition of these two vivid colors.