It is hard to imagine that Kathryn Refi’s painting “Color Recordings, Day 4” is the result of the

Kathryn Refi, "Color Recordings, Day 4," 2006 oil on panel, 61" x 100".

artist strapping a video camera to her head and continuously recording her entire day, except for time spent sleeping. To make the painting—one of seven similar enormous abstract canvases “documenting” seven days—Refi streamed the video footage through a computer program that analyzes the color in every pixel of every frame. From 729 hues that Refi pre-selected, the computer identifies those colors that make up at least 0.125 percent of the pixels in that day’s filming, a number she arbitrarily chose. These dominant colors then constitute each stripe, each stripe a single color, with as many as 137 stripes in a painting. At this point Refi abandons her preconceived conceptual method for making art and instead relies on her subjective powers to determine the placement of each color in her pulsating parade of vertical bars.
While evoking the non-referential formalism of Minimalism and Color Field painting, Refi’s paintings are filled with light and movement, in part due to the shimmering of the colors, the play of light against dark, and the progression of the bands across the image. Magically, these abstractions suggest atmosphere and even a sense of time. “I wanted to find out what color my environment was and I wanted to make people wonder about their own lives,” she says. “If they had a painting for one day, say January 5, what would it look like?”