Drummer, Larry Rivers

Archive Label 2003: In Drummer, Rivers draws upon his own experience as a jazz musician in New York during the 1950s. While attending the Julliard School of Music, Rivers became interested in the New York avant-garde and the style that emphasized not only the product of artistic creation but also the process of creating it. Rivers studied under two notable abstract expressionists, Hans Hofmann and William Baziotes, and so adopted the expressive, energetic brushwork of “action painting.” Drummer typifies the painterly, casually unfinished style of Rivers’ work during the mid-1950s and early 1960s. While merely suggesting the characteristics of the musicians themselves, Rivers emphasizes the action of music making. The motion of the drumsticks is mimicked in the rapid, percussive strokes Rivers employs to register the drummer’s movements through space and time. The improvisational nature of jazz is effectively communicated in this image, which itself stresses the process of artistic creation.