Why did Ad wear white to paint black paintings? What does it mean? These questions have been on the back burner for a long time, waiting for an answer.

Recently, my daughter came home with a book by Thomas Merton under her arm. Though an artist and extremely knowledgeable, she had not heard of the relationship between Merton and Reinhardt, a great and perfect friendship equally based on difference and similarity, many overlaps and one difference. Both men were open to goals set up by Buddhism; one chose the textural, the other the non-textural. Ad systematically erased the use of brushstroke to denote time, eventually achieving another time in painting beyond the textural. The two men also represented polarities in American spiritual art and life: action and meditation, which they sought to resolve. Each got something from the other. Ad’s most beautiful painting hung in Merton’s cell. Ad got the mandala: art for meditation, and Merton, confidence in his intuition and writing as an art form.

In sharing this with my daughter, I realized that the light I saw in Ad’s white coveralls was the light of Merton’s thought, the light of God.

Yours truly,
Richard Tuttle