Sol LeWitt’s passing yesterday has had me reviewing with gratitude the delight I have experienced with his handiwork. He lived outside of categorization, moving effortlessly as his desires morphed from Conceptualism to Minimalism to his own brand of glorious and retinally rich expressionism. His collaborative wall murals always felt fresh, immediate and irresistibly upbeat. My […]
Art Making
Landscape and Contemporary Art: Joan Mitchell
Joan Mitchell’s work straddles the line between abstract expressionism and landscape more than almost anyone else. Her paintings, many of them quite large, create a sense of place of their own while referencing our collective sense of land and the space surrounding us. On a personal level, Mitchell–in spite of all the horrific stories of […]
Painting, in the Larger Context
In her essay, ‘Moorditj Marbarn (Strong Magic)’, Aboriginal artist Julie Dowling quotes Jean-Paul Sartre who described the role of painting as ‘the painter paints the world only so that free men may feel their freedom as they face it’. Her belief that painting is her means of cultural and personal survival provides an important perspective […]
Landscape and Contemporary Art: Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park
Diebenkorn has been a flagship artist for me. I saw the first showing of his Ocean Park series while I was still in college, and seeing those luminous paintings was a turning point in my aesthetic education. I have never lost interest in this work, and every time I find one hanging in a museum–they […]
Landscape and Contemporary Art: Brice Marden
In a conversation with Brice Marden, Denise Green asks if he responds to one kind of landscape more than another: I’ve been more drawn toward the trees than the landscape space. I’m more interested in picking up the energy, rather than the details of the landscape. I want to transmit that kind of energy that […]
Landscape and Contemporary Art: Agnes Martin
My work is non-objective like that of the Abstract Expressionists. But I want people, when they look at my painting, to have the same feelings they experience when they look at landscape, so I never protest when they say my work is like landscape. But it’s really about the feeling of beauty and freedom that […]
Reading the Land
Kathleen Petyarre is one of the better known Aboriginal painters, and deservedly so. Her works are both complex and yet sublimely minimalist, suggesting both the macro and the micro view of the land around her. Many of her paintings pay homage to her dreaming ancestor Arnkerrth, the thorny or mountain devil lizard. Kathleen’s paintings, like […]
Ocularcentrism
Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula I’ve been back from Australia for two weeks, but my intoxication with Aboriginal art continues unabated. My night dreams and daytime ponderings are populated with images and senses that are not of this hemisphere. For years I have studied Aboriginal art though reproductions. As is the case with any artist whose work […]
Crossing the Line from Personal to Public
The following comment was made by Elatia Harris in response to the posting Bathed in Milk and Honey: Could it be that the “bathed in milk and honey moment” or better still the “eye-painting moment” for a work of art in the West is the moment it is exhibited before a public? We long so […]
Bathed in Milk and Honey
When the emphasis is on the metonymic, it is not only the mode of appreciation that is different, but the process of creation as well. When Indian artists carve these sacred figures, they proceed by accessing spiritual states of mind in which there is no separation between the creator and the created object. Western artists […]