In the early 1960s, Peter Ford Young began to harness aspects of Pointillism and Aboriginal art to create playful constellations of circles and dots. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who engaged in a more restrictive geometric abstraction, Ford focused on color and density to generate surprisingly sensual and monumental paintings. Number 22—1968 exemplifies his full journey into Pointillism, a technique of applying small, distinct dots of color to a canvas to form an image developed by late-nineteenth-century post-Impressionist painters. Here, monochromatic clusters and patterns—which are best seen with some distance—converge in multicolored blotches, offering simultaneously macro- and microcosmic imagining. By 1969, Young began to detach himself from American artistic circles, traveling to Morocco, Spain, and Costa Rica, where he spent time with the Boruca tribe.

Label from Giant Steps: Artists and the 1960s, June 30–December 30, 2018