Pat Steir (b. 1940)

“The impact of these [waterfall] paintings is compelling, hypnotic. There is to them something of the effect of slow motion or freeze-frame shots of the behavior of fluids—say the droplet of milk in D’Arcy Thomson’s On Growth and Form, or the motion of water droplets in surface tension in Eric Orr’s fountains. The Taoist theme of yin, water as female energy, was evoked in a symbolic way in the brush-painted wave pictures, but here, in the flung waterfall paintings, it is present far more directly, in the actual operation of fluid nature upon the surface.”

Thomas McEvilley, Pat Steir, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1994, p. 68.