[piano intro] [upbeat jazz music] ♪ [chime sounds] ♪ - [Narrator] When I saw Vernon Pratt's, "All the Possibilities of Filling in Sixteenths", It was, oh my God, why have I not seen this before?

I was surrounded by these itty bitty squares that began to dance on the walls and in my eyes, and it drew me away and up close and it became a performance.

You can't help it be moved intellectually and spiritually when you encounter this work.

- The name of the painting is called, "All the Possibilities of Filling in Sixteenths (65,536)."

"All the Possibilities of Filling in Sixteenths (65,536)."

So basically what it is, it's all the possibilities of filling in square divided into 16 pieces.

- To explain the painting is easy and hard at the same time, sort of like fractals.

Each thing is a component of the thing that's bigger than that.

You have a square that's got 16 divisions, it's part of a larger panel that is divided into 16 by 16.

That's part of an even larger thing that's 16 by 16.

So there's a sort of expanding sense of how little things become big things.

- Everybody talks about Vernon's paintings in terms of squares.

And of course, if it is a square, you'd have to call it a fat square, it's in a ratio of five to six.

Vernon's idea was that it would help keep the lateral progression moving.

It helped you know you were supposed to read laterally.

- There's 65,536 different ways of filling in by the sixteenths.

That number comes from having two possibilities for coloring each square.

So it's either gonna be black or white.

You have 256 panels of 256 possibilities of filling in by the sixteenths.

So basically it's the combinatorics behind the art that sort of tells you that if you know that you have 16 squares that you need to fill in, that means that each one of those tiles has two options for it.

So there's gonna be two to the 16.

He definitely has an exquisite mathematical mind.

- I think he felt a certain amusement in it all and recognized the hideously labor intensive, compulsive nature of it.

But at the same time, he was in dead earnest about what he was doing.

Of course he never had a chance to see all 256 panels installed.

- He basically painted each panel and then put them away.

And they gradually accumulated in his studio, first the studio in New York.

And then he moved to Durham and continued the project there.

- The back of each panel actually just reaffirms to me Vernon's sense of humor and imagination and kind of obsessiveness.

- Vernon had always envisioned this as being 16 panels high, 16 panels wide.

and therefore it would've been close to 40 feet tall and about 50 feet wide.

Unfortunately there are very few places on earth that have walls that are that shape.

You know, maybe the United Nations.

- He was interested in intellectual perfection but not mechanical perfection.

He had a strict system but he wanted to give it human touch.

- [Man] A lot of the enjoyment of this work comes from the sort of randomness of life or way things seem random.

And then you realize there's a pattern to it all.

I've explained it to people as it's sort of a glimpse of infinity because we have subatomic particles that make up atoms and then you have atoms that make up molecules and the molecules make up crystals.

And it goes on from there till you finally have all of reality.

- [Man 2] It almost feels like you're climbing inside Vernon's brain, and it feels like you're in a computer and how he works.

And it's just what makes the guy tick, it's a pretty incredible experience.

[maracas shaking] [upbeat jazz music] ♪ - I think Vernon Pratt is one of the great unsung heroes of art in North Carolina.

He straddles a line between science and art in some ways or mathematics and art, his real strength, with the paintings that based on the systematic abstraction, of approach that he used were I think in his own lifetime certainly never really recognized it for the power that they had.

- We served together on a committee at Duke.

I was an undergraduate, he was a professor and we were trying to examine how the arts could become more important at Duke because they weren't important at all.

Vernon had a building downtown in Durham and he owned a number of Andy Warhols.

He owned a couple of Richard Diebenkorns.

He was his graduate advisor out in San Francisco.

And I remember going to see him in his studio and of course the whole place smelled of turpentine.

And he had at canvases all around.

And it was clear just from the sort of trashiness of the studio that he was there at all hours, working on one thing over here and another thing over there.

- I really think of him as going his own way, very conscious of tradition, but independent and not inclined to do whatever was the trendy thing going on then.

- He liked to paint black and white, and he painted 1025 shades of black and white, with one being absolute white, 1025 being absolute black.

He felt that human eye could only discern 1025 shades of black and white.

That's the reason why he did it.

How on earth, he decided that, I will never know.

- [Man 3] Because of the prowess of things like abstract expressionism and things like that, we tend to value this moment of self realization.

And I don't think Vernon was all about that.

I think Vernon was after some real deep ways that the universe works and was really not that interested in self expression.

He wanted people to be able to see his work and to know how it was done.

- [Woman] He showed in various New York galleries and sometimes in group exhibitions there.

And he had plenty of exhibitions in North Carolina.

- Vernon Pratt, when he was making this work in the early eighties, obviously was in intellectual communication with the artists who dominated the art scene of the day, Rauschenberg Johns, Agnes Martin, Z Toley.

You see the influence in the movement of line.

You see it in the repetition of form and image but it was distinctly Vernon Pratt who pushed scale beyond anything these other artists had ever imagined.

- He was so multidimensional in his talents and interests and music was like math to him.

And Vernon would show up at all hours anywhere, to play music or listen to music.

- He played saxophone and flute.

It was a big part of Vernon's life.

And I think it relates to the paintings too.

- Vernon's death was totally unpredicted.

Still to this day, no one knows exactly what happened.

You know, he was found lying beside the road with his bicycle, but there were no bruises.

There were no skid marks.

His wife, Debbie was saddled with what to do with this huge body of work, the need to have a place for someone to actually work and create art was no longer there, but the need to store it was there.

So she located a warehouse in downtown Durham where it remained for several years, until there was a major storm that caused the ceiling to collapse in that warehouse.

And then she had to move it all to a second warehouse.

- I'm sure that seeing his art for a long time was probably painful for members of the family.

So it just kind of stayed locked up until finally his daughter Trinity wanted to clean out the warehouse and found some people who were willing to help.

- We certainly weren't equipped for the amount of work that I saw when I went out there with her to look at the warehouse, which had hundreds if not thousands of works of art in it, there were drawings and paintings and sculptures and all sorts of things.

It was an entire lifetime of creativity.

- It was like walking into a totally intact Egyptian tomb with beautiful artifacts, land everywhere.

And somebody saying, please, God, take them.

If I could ask Vernon Pratt' anything, I would ask him if ever had an actual expectation that this painting would be displayed.

Nobody does a painting that's 1,534 square feet and actually expects it to be displayed.

[upbeat jazz music] ♪ [upbeat jazz music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - [Man] I feel like this work has a power.

I feel like it has something to say.

I feel like it creates an experience for people.

It would be a shame to leave it in boxes again for another 35 years.

'Cause that's been about how long it was since it was created until it was finally put on display.

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