Texture

I like paintings with texture to the point of becoming relief paintings. When I was in NYC last month I had the opportunity to go the Metropolitan and the paintings that stand out in my mind are the ones with a lot of texture.

Jean Dubuffet’s is one who championed texture. From the Met’s page about one of his works:

In 1945 Dubuffet had begun creating what he referred to as hautes pâtes, paintings in which a thick paste served as the ground, color was used sparingly, and contours were scratched like graffiti. The paste used for the ground was made of tar, asphalt, and white lead, often enriched with cement, plaster, or varnishes, to which sand, coal dust, pebbles, and pieces of glass or straw might also be added. Gradually, color virtually disappeared from his work altogether.

This work by Anselm Kiefer, Bohemia Lies by the Sea, had a very engaging texture that isn’t evident from the photo of it. But then that’s how texture is. It is not satisfactorily simulated by photographs.

I like that the painting is of a landscape. Though it is a fairly simple one at that - with 2 lines down the middle suggesting a road. Flowers abstractly line the sides. Created in 1996 of oil, emulsion, shellac, charcoal, and powdered paint on burlap. The size is H. 75-1/4, W. 221 in. on two panels (each 110-1/2 in. wide). The title is from the title of a poem by Ingeborg Bachmann. This version translated by Peter Filkins.

Bohemia Lies By The Sea

If houses here are green, I’ll step inside a house.
If bridges here are sound, I’ll walk on solid ground.
If love’s labour’s lost in every age, I’ll gladly lose it here.

If it’s not me, it’s one who is as good as me.

If a word here borders on me, I’ll let it border.
If Bohemia still lies by the sea, I’ll believe in the sea again.
And believing in the sea, thus I can hope for land.

If it’s me, then it’s anyone, for he’s as worthy as me.
I want nothing more for myself. I want to go under.

Under - that means the sea, there I’ll find Bohemia again.
From my grave, I wake in peace.
From deep down I know now, and I’m not lost.

Come here, all you Bohemians, seafarers, dock whores, and ships
unanchored. Don’t you want to be Bohemians, all you Illyrians,
Veronese and Venetians. Play the comedies that make us laugh

until we cry. And err a hundred times,
as I erred and never withstood the trials,
though I did withstand them time after time.

As Bohemia withstood them and one fine day
was released to the sea and now lies by water.

I still border on a word and on another land,
I border, like little else, on everything more and more,

a Bohemian, a wandering minstrel, who has nothing, who
is held by nothing, gifted only at seeing, by a doubtful sea,
the land of my choice.

Looking for the poem that inspired the painting led me to find out that Kiefer was the first to create a “spectacular” art installation at the Grand Palais in Paris - for the new Monumenta project - his done for 2007. Sorry I missed it. It sounds like it would have been wonderful.

His title of his monumental work was Sternenfall (’Falling Stars’) - with themes including creation and cosmology inspired by nature, mysticism, poetry, memory and science. A lot of things that drive my own art.