#0924 Bush
Had to return to the previous one. Seemed there was another step. This was on my mind:
It is not a matter of painting life. It’s a matter of giving life to painting.
Pierre Bonnard
Light Cross and art talk: Ellsworth Kelly
#0923 Light
I have been reading a Henri Geldzahler interview with Ellsworth Kelly (he does the the advanced simplicity!). he said of his work:
I think the paintings are easy to like, but you have to want to like them.
Today I like his, and today I like mine.
More about Ellsworth follows.
Green Light
#0919 Green Light
See what I mean, even the pun on Green Light does not come through till now as I am posting it. GO!
Sun Cross II
Sun Cross 3
#0917 Sun Cross 3
The place my cafe doodles come from is quite different to my explorations like the crosses.
Reflections on this follow.
The Gray Slabs and the Holocaust
#0915 1944
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.â€
On another occasion, she referred to them as her “mud period.”
…
“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.
Stencil
#0907 Stencil
Here is another using stencil option. I cam make a stencil from any sketch and use it – to repeat, or to make larger, smaller or inverse. The potential still blows me away. Play is all I can do!
Hammer & Nail
#0906 Hammer & Nail
It is all quite a business! I mentioned that I would post up flowers, but here is a hammer. I’d forgotten I’d done it. Playing with stencils in ArtRage 2.5. Playing with tools! Sketching a digital hammer. I took longer to post this than I thought. Another HDD failure. However I am pleased to say I had the whole thing back up in an hour or two! The backup worked. But then I packed & travelled to Mt. Lyford. Now it is another day on. One more stencil play…
Red Square
#0897 Red Square
Another one found neglected from months ago. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
Hammers
#0896 Hammers
I will call this Hammers, though this morning, half asleep, I had a fantasy of calling it “Clawing back to where the hand never set foot”, which makes good sense to me.