[1] He met artists such as Mark Rothko, Theodoros Stamos, Frank Stella, Robert Ryman, and Ellsworth Kelly, who would end up having a large influence on his work.
As Kenneth Baker explains in Art in America in 1984, “Each of his works defines an ideal viewing distance that can be discovered only by patient observation of the focus of the details, the resolution of the image and the proper relationship between body and object.
This is Purism of a sort, in which generality does not contain variables but excludes them, in which the basic diagram or color, the only continuity, is exposed, here the essence of a confused sequence of perceptions.”[5] Donald Judd also likened these canvases to the work of Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and Josef Albers.
The theme is, simply stated, an expansive, lightly brushed, large grey field…surrounded by a painted framing edge…”[6] Here, Neil, too, references Albers, as well as TV screens, unfilled billboards, and Rothko.
Pincus-Whitten explains how Humphrey created “a luminous cosmos of fragile exhalations, painted on large squares or horizontal rectangles, softly turned at the corner and curved back into the stretcher.”[7] These canvases are noteworthy, too, for their use of day-glow colors.
Ellen Schwartz writes in 1977 about his show at John Weber, where his constructed paintings were still abstract: “Humphrey’s latest works, meditative rather than communicative, require the suspension of conscious efforts to grasp them before they will yield their secrets, which lay within ourselves all the while.
There is a more explicit sense of space, of indoors and outdoors.”[9] Beyond content, we see Humphrey using a brighter color palette and inserting vaguely figurative, whimsical patterns onto the surface.