The Fountain
Frank Stella
In the Fountain, Stella further explores the boundaries between artistic media. Although mural-sized, the piece - measuring 7 x 23 feet - is not a painting, but a print. The Fountain is Stella's most extensive work on paper to date and his culminating achievement in the medium of printmaking - a vital aspect of Stella's work since the 1960 - utilizing seven processes and sixty-one different colors. The piece belongs to a large, diverse series Stella created between 1985 and 1997 based on Herman Melville's Moby Dick. As such, for Stella it constitutes an homage of sorts to Abstract Expressionism, a number of whose artists also created works inspired by Ahab's epic struggle with the whale. Fittingly, and in keeping with the nonrepresentational nature of Stella's work, The Fountain is abstract, reflecting Stella's goal of conveying both a sense of motion and the power of the story, rather than the specific narrative.
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