SFX: Kelly naming colors punctuated slot machine clacking and dings to give a sense of them popping up at random 

KELLY:  

Green and black and white.  

Yellow green… green, orange (fades under)  

NARRATOR:  

When Ellsworth Kelly made this painting, he wasn’t calling the shots. He left it all… 

SFX: the pull of a slot machine arm  

NARRATOR:  

…to chance. 

SFX: Slot machine jackpot! 

NARRATOR:  

Here’s Sarah Roberts with more of the story.  

ROBERTS:  

He was very consciously trying not to be an expressionist painter kind of throwing his own psychology and emotions onto the canvas. There’s a quote where he says: “I want to remove the ‘I made this’ from my work.” So using chance is one strategy of keeping yourself out of the picture. So he came up with a chance system something akin to drawing things out of a hat.  

KELLY:  

I had numbered the squares, one through eighteen. I had decided that each color had a number.  

ROBERTS:  

He just then systematically placed square after square after square in this collage  

SFX: Slot machine arm 

KELLY:  

Dark blue next to a pink next to an orange… 

ROBERTS:  

…And created a painting from it.