PICTURES OF WHATEVER:

NOTES FROM A SELF TAUGHT

 

Tonight I’ll speak of one person’s compulsion to make art…mine. 

 

My art began with reams of paper and some pencils. I should mention my sister is a watercolorist, my son and daughter-in-law serious painters. I had not let myself in their worlds until I turned 60. I have studied art, in travels and looking at paintings in hundreds of galleries and museums. These galleries were my school. Then it happened. I began to draw, do pastels, paint like a crazy person. First small formats, copying from the masters, fashion magazines, nature. Hours every day. I poured over each work until what I call “the magic” was won. I would walk down the hill and report to my husband’s query, "what did you paint" to which I would respond, “a masterpiece.”

 

The process became the addiction. Color was my high, form my gravity. I had a show at Featherstone, and still have the comments from friends and strangers. I remember Allan Whiting’s, “keep painting”. And I did. And had more shows. My paintings grew in size. I was not afraid of big pieces of canvas or the color I used 

to paint them, always on the floor, on my knees or leaning over. (painting wrecks hips and knees). As always I took my subjects from my imagination or images I came across. 

 

A critic, Pepe Carmel, in Art News said Abstract art can fall into six categories: three in response to nature: cosmologies, landscapes and anatomies. And three in response to culture: fabrics, architecture, and signs. They often overlap. In my work, here, the paintings ”Field” and “Driveway” are landscape, and cosmology, using "emptiness" or unpainted canvas as the center of their universes. 

 

 I recently began to use a material that we throw away— bubble wrap.  I brush the bubble wrap with color then stamp it in geometric grids across the canvas, again and again until a pattern and color scheme scream “done”. Variations are endless. “Pockets of Air” I call them. Some times I would mix the patterns with brush work and other media such as stencil in the work called "what".

 

The bubble wrap paintings are signs, architecture, cosmology.

and I guess I could say ecology. I haven’t thrown any bubble wrap  away, often used again when dried. I didn't throw any gloves away from the pastels I did. Nor for a long time, any images I used for painting. Just in case. 

 

The painting “What?” has for me a cultural significance that sums up or attempts to penetrate our such fast pace world that we are often left in the state of “What?” What now, what next, so what? A favorite word of teens...as in so what? Another super large painting not here began to resemble circuits, circuits as in electricity, circuits in botany, circuits in brain activity. Yes The piece is called "Circuits". Did I preconceive any of this before I began to paint? No. That is what is so cool to me about finding out what is in there. 

 

I would like to mention some engaging thoughts from Kurt Varnedoe in his book " Pictures of Nothing". " art arouses in us a hunger for a culture...by giving us new forms that give shape to our feelings, our moment in history. Abstract art is propelled by this hope, this hunger. It reflects the urge to push toward the limit, to colonize the borderland around the opening onto nothingness, where the land has not been settled, where the new can emerge. " Does it work? What do we get out of it?"These are questions which arise from from American pragmatism, the dominant philosophy in our culture: useful when wondering about the abstract art before you.

 

one more pithy quote from Robert Motherwell: 1965

‘the problems of inventing a new language are staggering…the interest in language so dominant in modern art

is not an interest in semantics per se: it is a continual interest in making language (whatever the medium) to fit our feelings better.”

 

 Samuel Beckett says " let us hope the time will come...when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused."