Few styles of painting invite the appreciator to ponder the mind of the artist like abstract. With its rejection of representational images, the conversation quickly turns to the artists feelings, interests and worldview. In the case of Sam Gilliam, whose colorful work brings order and chaos and dimension to the canvas, The Ringling’s Marian Carpenter, Associate Director of Collections, offers an intriguing explanation. “Gilliam’s work is almost like a visual representation of jazz music,” she says.

Gilliam was a prominent member of the Washington Color School, a collection of abstract painters that championed the use of color field and lyrical abstraction techniques to express a rapidly changing social environment. The same could be said for jazz music, particularly post-war bebop with its frenetic and unhinged rejection of conventional music rules seeming to express the fragmentation and anxiety of the mid-century. Jazz musicians took existing chord progressions and bent them to their will, creating something avant-garde in the process. For Gilliam, it was the established conventions of abstract painting and color field techniques that he infused with his own burst of energy and genius to create pieces exploding with texture, color and joy.

His experimentation would see him work on unstretched canvases, with metal and plywood, printmaking and collage techniques. The Ringling’s exhibition, compiled primarily from private local collections, includes a broad survey of these mediums and techniques.

Slanting (1993, acrylic and collage on panel) serves as a fitting synopsis of his style and hangs at the entrance to the exhibition space. Composed of thickly applied acrylic paints on dozens of pieces of paper, Gilliam manages to wield chaos and order with an even hand. The different pieces of paper collaged together give each color its own distinct place in the whole, and even on the piece’s right hand side, where black and salmon and green share an edge, there’s a unity of vision that shows careful deliberation.

Other pieces like the silkscreen St. Albans push the boundaries of complexity in their respective mediums. Chaotic hash marks in myriad different colors are laid over the suggestion of an American flag, the whole print likely requiring a dozen or more different screens to layer the colors. In the case of What Fish Sea I and What Fish Sea II, Carpenter and executive director Steven High secured two smaller pieces of Gilliam’s unstretched canvas works. Stitched together from several different oil-painted pieces of material, the paintings take on the look of colorful found objects or deconstructed jackets. “What’s really neat about these is that they never hang exactly the same way twice,” says High, “so every time they’re exhibited, the viewer gets something a little different.”

Miles Davis and John Coltrane would be proud. “Sam Gilliam: Selections” runs through August 15th.

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