Thousand Sketches

#0915 1944
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Story:

I have been reading Robert Hobbs, Lee Krasner

The Gray Slabs and the Holocaust

There may well be other, heretofore unexplored factors besides Krasner) difficulty of coming to grips with intuition that explain why most of her works during the years from approximately 1943 to 1946-47 so often end up looking like gray slabs of paint, which she referred to as gray stones.

…

As Krasner explained, “I went into my own black-out period which lasted two or three years where the canvases would simply build up until they’d get like stone and it was always just a gray mess. The image wouldn’t emerge… I was fighting to find I knew not what.”

On another occasion, she referred to them as her “mud period.”

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“I was saying, I paint. I paint every day. This is what’s happening to me.” Krasner said. I faced the issue very aggressively. I was having a rough time, and I didn’t care who knew it.”

None of these experiments with intuition now exist, because Krasner subjected them to a thorough soaking in the bathtub before scraping them down so that she could reuse the canvases.

A possible explanation for these dense, turgid works of the mid-1940s is that they were subliminal reactions to the mass murders of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, which were then being publicly acknowledged in New York.

I think she is courageous just to keep going for three years with stone slabs! That must have been agony. I felt the loss of those gray stone slabs. I wish she had honoured her process more and kept them. This one is in my sketch of that story. One layer has “1944′ written on it. The time Krasner was in this mud. Also the year I was born, in occupied Amsterdam.

#0835 Layer Tunnel Pattern
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In a lot of art it is integral that one can see the process, in the strokes, or even in the glimpse of the studio. The tools are showing here!

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Still don’t have my Tablet back. Do have a new disk from the crashed HDD, has a lot of good stuff rescued, but not the missing 10 days sketches. Yet. Back to the HDD Dr. tomorrow.

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Far from feeling curtailed today, I am stimulated by the process of the technological and human failures (failed to backup those missing days – I was moving around too much to reconnect the external drive, so Second Copy would simply say “Drive not found” and go back to sleep.)

One good thing was a synchronicity while surfing. I found some digital art I liked. There is so much, and so much of that leaves me neutral.

Somehow they also got me sketching, thinking.

Here are 2 images I saw & liked.
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#0796 Break
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I explore lines quite a bit. And circles and crosses, more coming up. A line is a lot. It makes a break between this & that. Boundaries. Gaps, barriers. I like lines. I am safe with a good line. The Thousand Sketches is a line and a circle, it is a boundary around this project, makes me work hard, but I know it will stop.

Lines, I have fiddled with this one, made it gray, this felt very blue. And widened the gap! Will post results later.

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I just read an interview in The Christchurch art gallery Bulleting 150 Julian Dashper whose exhibition in Christchurch I saw. Here he talks about circles:

l notice that circles recur often in your work, not only with your records but also in your repeated use of drum sets and the (0) paintings. What is the significance of circles for you?

I first started working with circles circa (smile out loud) 1992. Another older artist had suggested to me that a circle was really the hardest shape to work with as it totally dictated itself. It’s difficult to paint a budgie inside a circle and for it still to look good, I guess. I just immediately thought,‘Gosh a painting that makes itself’, and rushed our and bought a compass. Circles also echo ideas in nature For me, and you can’t get more perfect than that (nature, I mean). Actually, the thing is, Peter, every artist has to start somewhere and I figure a circle is as good a place as a railway station.