DRESSED IN COWBOY boots and jeans, her long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, Mary Corse stands in her new studio, on a break from a day of painting. “It has heating now—fancy,” she says, chuckling as she compares it to her drafty old workspace. “I can get a lot more done.” Her house, which is just behind the studio, is surrounded by towering palms and a backyard barbecue, as well as lemon trees laden with ripe yellow fruit. She can’t really have pets, because of the rattlesnakes.
As the works at the Whitney demonstrate, Corse has been on a remarkably consistent artistic trajectory for decades. “Capturing light has been her quest,” notes Conaty. The earliest painting in the show, 1964’s Untitled (Octagonal Blue), is one of the rare instances of color; many of the other pieces are predominantly white. “Different colors make for different internal journeys,” says Corse. “They create emotions and feelings.” But the clue is in the materials: The metal flakes embedded in the acrylic blue paint show her trying to render light. That quest continued with her fluorescent light boxes, like Untitled (White Light Series) from 1966.
Following this period, Corse moved to a phase where white itself represented light. The painting Untitled (White Grid, Vertical Strokes), 1969, is a feat of subtle tone variation that makes the hand of the artist palpable. Untitled (White Double Arch), 1998, presents a crisp black shape resembling a gateway, with a bifurcated white background that suggests an open book. Like all of her work, it’s an invitation of sorts.
In 1968, she took to embedding glass microspheres in her paint, a move that fueled her best-known works. The idea came to her through a classic aha! moment one dark night while cruising down the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. “It struck me when I was driving, ‘What’s in those white lines?’ ” she recalls of the road paint. “As they lit up, I thought, Oh, I’ve got to try that.” She learned from the highway department that there were different-size beads mixed into the paint used for pavement markings; she bought them from the same manufacturer and started blending them together to create a recipe she could use.
Her tools varied over the years, but they all served the underlying understanding that the perceptual was everything. “I realized there was no objective truth; it wasn’t out there,” she says. “That was a big deal.”
“Her work has evolved a lot, in a tight range,” says Turrell, who gives her credit for pushing forward even when the art world wasn’t very encouraging. “She kept the faith and stayed with it—she got through to the other side.” Being an older artist has its perks, says Turrell: “She’s freed up now in a way she might never have contemplated before. It’s a great period for her.”
Corse agrees, but true to form, she is focused on making new art rather than talking about it. The adulation of the exhibitions will be pleasant, but outside validation is not what has powered her this far, because that can be a trap. Despite her devotion to art and her shunning of doing anything else to make money, she chafes at the idea that it’s a job. “I don’t know if I want to be a ‘professional artist,’ ” she says, smiling. “I guess you want to stay free.”