This painting’s repeating, horizontal bands of color extend incompletely across the textured canvas; the work was listed as unfinished in Donald Judd’s 1975 catalogue raisonné. Judd added sand to the paint he used in this and other early works, in an attempt to “make it just surface.”1
Although Judd had previously used black oil paint to cover the surface of a painting on canvas, he employed wax and sand in addition to the oil, creating a deeper black with more depth. Describing the connection between his painting and his works in three dimensions, Judd said in a 1965 interview, “One of the reasons, I guess, that my stuff is geometric is that I want it simple, and I want it nonnaturalistic, or nonimagistic, or nonexpressionistic. The simpleness, as far as I’m concerned, goes all the way back through my other paintings, almost to when I first started working.”2