Gene Davis (painter)

In the 1950s, Gene Davis, with Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis was one of a small group of painters called the Washington Color School who made experimentation with colours.

In Washington he closely studied works in the Phillips Collection including paintings by Pierre Bonnard and Paul Klee, to which he later attributed his heightened sense of color.

[3][4] In 1972 Davis created Franklin's Footpath, which was at the time the world's largest artwork, by painting colorful stripes on the street in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the world's largest painting, Niagara (43,680 square feet), in a parking lot in Lewiston, New York.

Stripes are a recurrent theme in art history and he used it as a formal canon to examine various aspects of color using a reduced range of resources.

For a public work in a different medium altogether, he designed the color patterns of the "Solar Wall," a set of tubes filled with dyed water and backlit by fluorescent lights, at the Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.