Blue Freak-Out by Gene Davis is a painting from 1966. It is made of acrylic paint on canvas and measures roughly nine and a half feet by nine and a half feet. This painting is an example of an abstraction, which is a style of painting that focuses on the gestural movement of shapes and colors rather than depicting scenes or figures. The paint is comprised of a series of long thin, vertical stripes that are different colors. In many ways, it looks like a stretched-out barcode, like the kinds scanned at stores on items for purchase. One key difference is that the vertical stripes in Blue Freak-Out are all the same width, of a little under two inches. The bright, almost technicolor stripes are vertically aligned and bone-straight, giving the artwork a dramatic effect. The colors range from black, brown, grey, pink, purple, maroon, bright green, orange, cyan, light blue, turquoise, dark blue, salmon, gold, plum, and olive. While there are occasionally patterns of repeating colors, there seems to be no order to the color of the stripes. The contrast of colors and repetition of the stripes gives the painting the effect of moving or changing as the viewer’s eyes adjust across the rapid succession of color.