Gillian Ayres and Therese Oulton

____________Gillian Ayres



______________________Therese Oulton

Gillian Ayres and Therese Oulton are British painters who paint rather expressively. Gillian Ayres was born in 1930 - her paintings reflect more the influence of Abstract Expressionism - she started out being inspired by Jackson Pollock. Therese Oulton was born in 1953 and her work is more neo-expressionist along the lines of Anselm Kiefer- in that more depth in shown, and the newer paintings also incorporate landscape in an expressionistic manner. Both artists use thick paint and textures.

Gillian Ayres - Tachiste Painting No.1 1957

Gillian Ayres - Antony and Cleopatra 1982

From the Tate online:

'Anthony and Cleopatra' was painted in the artist's studio at Llaniestyn, North Wales in the winter of 1981-2. It contrasts with the densely worked surfaces of her paintings during the 1970s. Ayres has explained that she wanted to achieve a sense of the sublime through the scale of markings. It also differs from other paintings of the early 1980s in having a yellow ochre ground rather than a white ground. The reason for this was that she was snowed in for several days and was unable to purchase any white lead. As usual, the title was given after the painting was completed. Ayres's titles do not describe the subject of the paintings. Rather the titles have a 'resonance' which relates to the character of each work.
(From the display caption September 2004)

A roomful of Ayre's at the British School at Rome

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Therese Oulton - DISSONANCE QUARTET NO. 3 1986

From the Tate Online Oulton is quoted:

a series of oil paintings called ‘Dissonance Quartet’ which I showed in Vienna while I was living in Vienna. The reference was to Mozart's ‘Dissonance Quartet’. It was the idea that the ‘Dissonance Quartet’ does not end on a tonic resolution; and it was the idea of taking something of wholeness, like harmony or the circle, and then emptying that of its usual connotations. At the time, my particular concern was to take given meanings and see if they were still workable, or whether the weight of meaning was too great to use any more...

In the series things were turned inside out, and body metaphors, I think, began to creep in ... I began to like where the armour-plating became the flesh, so it was kind of turned inside out. There was often a kind of ribbing that could have been something protective. And the surface is bowed out like a Counter-Reformation Mannerist type of painting.

Therese Oulton - Untitled No.3 2007

Some of Therese Oulton's paintings merely suggest nature, but many of her later works (as can be seen at the Marlborough Gallery site) look like views from airplanes. Many with cites and roads suggested, some with shorelines. The landscapes look rather cut-up- in that there is the sense that human buildings have altered the landscapes. Some of her newer ones are oil on aluminum - most are oil on canvas.

Judy Chicago & Feminist Content

Judy Chicago created art with content and meaning at a time when content and meaning were being scorned. It's no surprise to me that the art with content and meaning is the more survivable. In retrospect it's nice to have some idea what people were thinking in a certain time.

In the 70s - when the historically disenfranchised were finding and creating unique modes of expression - the mainstream art world was saying that there was nothing to say.

__________________Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, now at home in the Brooklyn Museum, addresses Female agency and the problem of erasure throughout most of recorded history. I am acutely aware of exceptional women who have been "forgotten" (on purpose) and the effect that that can have on women's identity. I especially appreciate the Dinner Party and that it does have a home in Brooklyn, where I can visit (I've been there once so far, and expect to return).

From Women, Art and Society (Whitney Chadwick):

In 1981, Griselda Pollock and Roszika Parker argued that the iconography of Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, specifically it's vaginal imagery, was retrograde because it set itself up for exploitation: It is easily retrieved and co-opted by a male culture because [it does] not rupture radically meanings and connotations of women in art as body, as sexual, as nature, as object for male possession."

____________________So it's interesting to see how the art is perceived nearly 30 years later. At the time, I think the "vaginal" imagery seemed more "shocking". In retrospect, and actually seeing all of the plates - the art is not as sexual as it may sound. Many of the plates look more like flowers than vulvas. Just as much phallic art does not look so much penile, as suggestive of the form.

To Pollock's and Parker's that the art be "easily retrieved and co-opted by a male culture", for one thing, I don't think that is the case (with this - but I agree that it easily can be with more obviously sexual art), but for another, with the main gist of the art being about women's history and lost contributions, if the art is such that it can be integrated into male culture and art history - then all the better. Not only will Judy Chicago and feminism have it's place in history, so will many of the women who are represented with place settings.

There are such great references on so many levels - women having a place at the table (often denied) while women having been the ones to set the table and create the atmosphere, often taken for granted, often anonymously. That it was a group project with many women involved is also an important part of the piece, what with that being how women have often worked historically.

Recently, Through the Flower.org, another group of women working with Judy Chicago, has created a K-12 curriculum to help teachers use the Dinner Party as a learning vehicle. Much of this has all come about within the last 5 years. For quite awhile in between - the Dinner Party was in some sort of historical limbo (and in storage).

You never know how something in the present will be perceived in the future. Though whether a major museum anoints something as worthy is one huge part, and whether it is taught in schools in another. That women's art is represented to the extent that that they are in Museums is due the efforts of many, many women pushing for that - yet the under-representation sadly persists.

I love the Guerrilla Girls poster that reads, "When Racism and Sexism are no longer fashionable, What will your Art Collection be Worth". So far, white male art still has a stranglehold on most of the American art world. When I visited the MOMA a few months ago, I thought is was ridiculous how many Piscassos were hanging compared to the number of pieces by women. I would definitely rather see more art by women - I would not miss not seeing many of the Picassos. As the same GG poster states, one of those Jasper Johns (or Picassos) for 17.7 million would buy one each of app. 65-75 well known women artist's art. I would guess that there were something like 10 times as many Picassos (not to mention all of the other male art) as there was art by women.

I agree with Griselda Pollock, that male art should not be perceived as gender-free, while women's art is considered the "other", as if male art represented people and female art only represented women. If there is any sense of equality, the view of the world by women should be represented equally with the art by men. Museum directors (even some women ones) still hold on to the idea that the art by men is the influential art, while the art by women is not. But that is so, only as long as they make it so.

Ana Mendieta

Prior to the 60s, women were advised to divorce art from female experience and self-awareness. During the 60s, various artists were breaking out from these restraints. Marisol, Eva Hesse, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar. Other artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Louise Nevelson, Alice Neel and Frida Kahlo finally started getting the attention they long deserved.

Ana Mendieta (American, born Cuba 1948–1985) came on the scene with her performance - earth/body images in 1972 - having studied intermedia at the University of Iowa. Some artists had been making monumental earth works and others had been making performance pieces with their bodies - and Mendieta made an interesting link with her earth-body pieces. Some of her pieces refer to prehistoric goddess imagery, many are about re-connecting humans and nature.

Grass On Woman - 1972 - Lifetime color photograph___________

In 1973, Judy Chicago (who will be speaking in Evansville next Monday) and Miriam Shapiro asked the question, 'What does it feel like to be a woman?" The art world had been so focused on the male point of view, that it was something to think about for women. Some women thought (still think?) that any male/female differences are a matter of socialization and are not real. But even then, there are different sensory issues, the ability to give birth, etc.

Imagen de Yagul -1973 - Lifetime color photograph___________

“I have been carrying on a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette)… I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). Through my earth/body sculptures I become one with the earth… I become an extension of nature and nature becomes an extension of my body…” - Ana Mendieta

Silueta Works in Mexico - 1973-78 -C-Print

"One beach sculpture consists of red bouganvillea blossoms in the shape of the artist’s body with arms raised. The incoming waves have washed away the lower part of the figure. For those familiar with Santeria, the symbolism is clear: Chango, a principal orisha, always is represented by the color red. His mistress is Yemayá, orisha of the ocean, whose frothy waves represent her lacy petticoats. Mendieta’s art shows Yemayá’s petticoats covering the legs of Chango, whose arms are raised in surprise or delight. Like the ocean, Yemayá represents both a loving and wrathful mother; they say you can take shelter from your enemies under her skirts, but if you provoke her anger, there is nowhere you can hide." (Virginia Miller Gallery)

_________________________________

Mendieta was among the first to reconnect with ancient concepts such as the Tree of Life. The Tree of Life goes back to some of the earliest of civilizations in and around the Middle East and Indus Valley. Some have speculated that the Tree of Life and Mother Goddess concepts traveled from India through or around Europe to Scandinavia and Ireland and even to the Americas. There are similarities in art, ideas, and rituals that connect Old India with Old Celtic / Viking and Aztec. The Tree of Life was a symbol that connected life and death, earth and sky.

Tree of Life - 1976 - Lifetime color photograph

Hirshorn Show
Virginia Miller Gallery Show

Mercedes Matter

Mercedes Matter - 1934
Mercedes Matter (1913-2001) was one of the founding members (at age 23 as Jeanne Carles) of American Abstract Artists in 1936. Other founding members included: Josef Albers and David Smith. Louise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson joined later, as did many other well-known abstract artists.

She got work with the WPA, dated Arshile Gorky (when he was still a non-citizen and couldn't work for the WPA), studied with Alexander Archipenko & Hans Hoffman, and met Lee Krasner in jail. Mercedes and Lee were arrested for participating in a strike in 1935. Matter worked with Fernand Leger on murals.
1940________________________

1943-45 she spent in California, married to Herbert Matter and had a baby. She returned to NYC in 1946.

"Then it was the Cedar Bar and The Club itself. All kinds of nonsense went on about membership, about how to pick members, whether women should be admitted. There was quite a fuss about making Mercedes Matter the first female member of The Club and things like that"

-Leo Castelli

Matter wrote:

"The Artists’ Club was formed in which I was the one female original member in a very male dominated situation. However, the Club became a most unique and wonderful thing including artists of the widest divergence from Edwin Dickinson to Phillip Guston, Bradley Tomlin to Joan Mitchell, with the composers and writers as much a part. The Cedar Bar during those years was perhaps the best part of my education. As de Kooning said, “Art is something you can’t talk about and you talk about forever.”

"Influenced by the artistic precepts of Hofmann, Matter was a proponent of painting directly from nature. Her works are characterized by vigorous angular marks and geometricized rhythms. Many of her pieces represent a unique fusion of advanced gestural abstraction and a sensitive perceptual observation of landscape and still-life motifs." - Figge

The paintings that she created in the 30s are compared to Gorky's (of course he could have just as easily been influenced by her). Matter's painting above from 1940 suggests DeKooning's "Woman I" done in 1950. Mercedes Matter certainly seems to have been an influential figure in the Abstract Art genre - and yet I had never heard of her. The artcyclopedia.com/ does not include her on their site, and she is absent from many accounts of art of the times.

She started teaching at the Philadelphia College of Art (now called the University of the Arts), Pratt and NYU. She was a visiting critic at Antioch, Brandeis, Cincinnati School of Art, Kansas City Art Institute, Maryland Institute, Yale University, Skowhegan and American University in Washington.
1942

She was in groups shows:

American Abstract Artists, 1936-42

Stable Gallery, annual shows, 1950’s

Peridot Gallery, early 1950’s

Tanager Gallery, annual exhibitions, 1950’s and many others

In recent years her work has been seen in show such as "Pollock Matters" and "From Hartley to Hofmann
Provincetown Vignettes, 1899-1945"

She had her first one person show in 1956 at the Tanager Gallery.

It was apparently typical for women not to get one person show for years after their male peers had. (In an LA Weekly article, Doug Harvey suggests the reason for her late one-person show was her inability to commit to a solo show earlier.)

from 1962___________________

There is a retrospective of her work which is on it's last leg at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport Iowa - through January 2,2011.

Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, Louise Bourgeious - Surrealism

I have toyed with surrealism some. I like the opportunity to express ideas and emotions that could not be similarly expressed in pure abstraction or pure realism.

From what I've read of the surrealist movement, however, it was dominated by misogynistic males. I saw a show in Copenhagen (2009) that was the most anti-female art that I have ever seen in a museum. It gave me the creeps.

It is interesting to learn in Frida Kahlo's biography that while she spent some time with the Surrealists in Paris- that she didn't care much for their theorizing. She was not interested in being considered a part of their group.

I am finishing the book, Women, Art, and Society by Whitney Chadwick (many images from the book can be found here). In the book, there is an image, supposedly by Leonor Fini called Sphinx Regina which I like (a close-up of nature with bones)- but it is so unlike anything else that I see that was done by her (mostly women with little background)- that I don't think it was by her. At the very least, it is not representative, from what I can tell.


___________________Leonor Fini
Red Vision___________________


___________________Leonor Fini Grande___________________


Fini's paintings tend toward the ghostly / spiritual.
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___________________Leonora Carrington Labyrinth___________________

There is an University of Albany Museum site featuring several 20th century women (based on an exhibition) that has an image by Leonora Carrington (born England 1917, lives in Mexico) - Big Badger Meets the Domino Boys. Fortunately I looked up some others by her - because that one did not seem representative, either. But it did not seem so completely differnt and it may just be a different stage in her life. Carrington also paints images that suggest spirituality.


___________________Leonora Carrington Voteaza___________________

____________________________
Louise Bourgeious (1911-2010) was an artist who dabbled in many looks - usually with an organic orientation. I like her surrealistic Femme Maison paintings. (I also like her gigantic cast spider).


___________________ Louise Bourgeious Femme-Maison___________________

From the Tate Modern site:

Femme Maison means ‘housewife’: literally, ‘woman house’. In these paintings, as in so much of her work, Bourgeois shows the home as an essentially female place, in which she can explore ideas about female identity. She said the Femme Maison ‘does not know that she is half naked, and she does not know that she is trying to hide. That is to say, she is totally self-defeating because she shows herself at the very moment that she thinks she is hiding’.

___________________Louise Bourgeious Femme-Maison___________________ (from 1945-6 - when her children were little. she also did a later version in marble)

Unlike Fini and Carrington, Bourgeious' images of the Femme Maison (as well as much of her other art) seem to deal more with life than the supernatural.

Art Seen in NYC - 2010

Ceramic shapes in a Japanese Gallery in Chelsea.




__________________

These are from various galleries in Chelsea - June 2010. I especially liked to see the abstract textured paintings - some of which suggested landscapes. There were, interestingly, a lot of drips... and expressionism.

"The Death of Nature"

"The Death of Nature" is a book by Carolyn Merchant (1980).

The book is about people turning toward a mechanistic view of nature - esp. in the 1600s. The founding of the microscope was one element. People gaining more of an understanding of how nature works. Prior to the microscope - the general idea in the West was that in reproduction women contributed matter, while men (supposedly being superior) contributed "spirit" or "energy". It might have partly been a result of men falling off the pedestal they created for themselves that contributed to the shift.

Prior to that - nature was thought of in more anthropomorphical terms - as "Mother Nature", "Mother Earth". And people had more concern over the consequences of extracting resources. As if it would hurt the earth. Ecological concerns go way back hundreds of years to when people were polluting rivers from iron making and one thing or another. There have always been those who were disturbed by damage to natural environment.

In the 1600s - one of the main power sources was lumber - turned into ships that then could travel around the world in trade or in aids to war. The toll on the trees in England and in France became a concern and conservation measures had to be implemented.

Also - industries were polluting England so much that some were sent over to New England - much like Americans have sent industries to Mexico or China.

But the main idea was the problem of a mechanized world view and the subsequent lack of concern for the environment. It became easier for people to think of the earth as resources to extract, to make money from. The idea that people could have control over nature - that order and power could be imposed. The more people thought of nature in those terms - the easier it was to exploit.

There were some who wanted to hold on to ideas that matter was one thing - but spirit and God were another. Even Newton - with his scientific understanding didn't want to let go of God completely. There seemed to be a sort of balance that people wanted to adopt - the mechanistic world - that God WANTED people to exploit - to control. This allowed people to feel OK about what they were doing with their capitalistic endeavors.

Even today - the concept that this world is a temporary world on one's way to paradise is a way to allow people to muck up the earth - because it doesn't really matter - it's "Fallen", anyway.

If people can realize that this world is absolutely awesome - those who live here now (or at any time) should feel compelled to keep it that way for future generations. No generation of people should ever figure that THEY have the right to live in luxury while destroying the planet for the future. That would be a big step. It doesn't require that people believe or don't believe in God - it just requires that everyone realizes how awesome the world is - and that nobody would want to screw it up for others alive now or later.

Everyone should be able to accept that global warming, pollution, etc. will affect everyone. While it will hurt some more than others - no-one should figure that they can stay above the fray. We are all in this together.

Selections from IU-Bloomington MFA shows 2010

a few paintings

these photographs were very interesting - flattened skin - rather changes the way you might think of bodies...


sculptural ceramics

............................an installation

Leonardo da Vinci and Observation

____________________________
I listened to Sherwin Nuland's book about Leonardo on my way home from visiting out east. I noticed that Chris Nickson had blogged about it by trying to find one of Da VInci's quotes I had heard:

“Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority uses not his understanding but his memory.”

“Those who study the ancients and not the works of Nature are stepsons and not sons of Nature, the mother of all good authors.”

“The grandest of all books, I mean the Universe, stands open before our eyes.”

It was interesting to hear about how extremely Da Vinci had observed and also how importantly he viewed sight in relation to other senses and ways of knowing. He was interested in energy, movement, and the "rhythmic harmonies of life".

He wanted to understand the muscles around the mouth because of their importance in facial expressions and because of his idea that the face was expression of the soul.

He was more of an anatomist than I realized - where he went beyond dissecting to understanding underlying structures and processes. I also thought it was interesting that he saw nature as the ultimate instead of relying on explanations from "God" as most still did then.

Notes from Nickson of Nuland:

He developed techniques to convey information through his drawings using cross-sections and multiple angles. Remarkably, centuries would pass before anatomical drawings became accepted as crucial for learning anatomy – indeed in his review of the 1858 first edition of ‘Gray’s Anatomy‘, Oliver Wendell Holmes actually criticized the book for including drawings.

Among Leonardo’s countless achievements in anatomy were:
• the deduction of the hierarchical structure of the nervous system, with the brain as a command center.
• the deduction that it was the retina of the eye that was sensitive to light, not the lens as previously believed. He learned to dissect the fragile structures of the eye by inventing new methods that involved sectioning the eye after it had been fixed by heating in egg whites.
• discovering the lesions of atherosclerosis and their possible role in obstruction of the coronary arteries. Even more remarkably, he presciently attributed these lesions to an “overabundance of nourishment” from the blood.
• the identification of the heart as muscle and speculations on the origin of body heat and the heart’s activity. He also discovered that the arterial pulse corresponds to ventricular contraction and that the ventricle shortens during contraction.
•the development of an understanding of mechanics by replacing muscles with wires. This allowed him to foreshadow Sherrington’s theory of reciprocal innervation of antagonistic muscles working across joints in complementary fashion. He was also able to work out specific actions such as that of biceps brachii, which he showed not only flexes the elbow but also supinates the hand through its twisting action on the ulna.
• working out that the tumescent penis becomes erect by filling with arterial blood, rather than air as previously supposed.
• the first to state that the mother’s contribution to the inherited characteristics of the fetus are equal to that of the father.

According to Nuland, one of Leonardo’s most impressive discoveries concerned the obscure topic of how aortic valves close. He determined that the aortic valves close while the ventricle is still contracted. This occurred because of the pressure created by eddy currents generated by the effect of the sinuses of Valsalva on blood flow through the proximal aorta. Leonardo elegantly demonstrated this using a model of the proximal aorta and ventricular outflow tract through which he allowed water containing millet to flow; the millet allowed visualization of the patterns of current and turbulence created in the flowing fluid. The rest of the world had to wait over 400 years, until 1969, for this ingeniously worked-out theory to be conclusively proven and (re)discovered using dye and cineradiography methods.

About Creativity

I think this is a good article. It's interesting the difference about heightened use of visual cortices and the shutting down of visual cortices to allow other ideas to flow. And that “openness to experience,” is associated with creativity and corresponds with slower nerve traffic. And of course - there is the letting go of the conventional.

Charting Creativity: Signposts of a Hazy Territory From the New York Times...

Dr. Kounios, who studies the neural basis of insight, defines creativity as the ability to restructure one’s understanding of a situation in a nonobvious way.

...As for Dr. Jung, his research has produced some surprising results. One study of 65 subjects suggests that creativity prefers to take a slower, more meandering path than intelligence.

“The brain appears to be an efficient superhighway that gets you from Point A to Point B” when it comes to intelligence, Dr. Jung explained. “But in the regions of the brain related to creativity, there appears to be lots of little side roads with interesting detours, and meandering little byways.”

Although intelligence and skill are generally associated with the fast and efficient firing of neurons, subjects who tested high in creativity had thinner white matter and connecting axons that have the effect of slowing nerve traffic in the brain. This slowdown in the left frontal cortex, a region where emotional and cognitive abilities are integrated, Dr. Jung suggested, “might allow for the linkage of more disparate ideas, more novelty and more creativity.” ...

“Creativity is a collection of different processes that work in different areas of the brain,” Dr. Kounios said, so the creative act must be broken down into tiny pieces. He also rejects utility as part of the definition, arguing that there can be brilliant and creative failures — what he calls near misses.

...A lot of different areas of the brain are involved in devising a solution, no matter which process is used, but during the Aha! moment, there is a burst of high-frequency activity in the right temporal lobe, Dr. Kounios said. What’s more, he said, he and Dr. Beeman could predict in advance which process a subject would use. They watched the brains of systematic problem solvers prepare by paying closer attention to the screen before the words appeared. Their visual cortices were on high alert.

The brains of those who got a flash of creative insight, by contrast, prepared by automatically shutting down activity in the visual cortex for an instant — the equivalent of closing your eyes to block out distractions so that you can concentrate better. In this case, Dr. Kounios said that the brain was “cutting out other sensory input and boosting the signal-to-noise ratio” to retrieve the answer from the subconscious.

According to Kenneth Heilman, a neurologist at the University of Florida and the author of “Creativity and the Brain” (2005), creativity not only involves coming up with something new, but also with shutting down the brain’s habitual response, or letting go of conventional solutions.

Risk taking and addictive behavior should also be measured, since both traits play a role in creativity, he said.

There may be, for example, a dampening of norepinephrine, the neurotransmitter that sets off the fight-or-flight alarm. That’s why creative connections often occur when people are most peaceful — relaxing under a tree, like Isaac Newton, or in a dream state, like Coleridge when he thought up “Kubla Khan.”

John Gabrieli, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, cautions that there is always a gap between what happens in the lab and the real world: “It seems that to be creative is to be something we don’t have a test for.”

Hypatia & Raphael

I was reading about Hypatia and came across this:

Raphael was commissioned to paint The School of Athens for Pope Julius II. The fresco was to be painted above the philosophical section of the Pope’s personal library. In his original draft, Raphael placed Hypatia in the center, just below the central figures of Plato and Aristotle. The church fathers ordered her removal. Raphael still managed to sneak her into the fresco, however, disguised as another figure. Hypatia is the woman dressed in white in the lower left of the painting, looking directly out at the viewer. Hypatia, once condemned by a church father, now gazes out over the church fathers.

What a sad reflection on the church "fathers" that they had such a problem with a great woman philosopher being given a prominent position in a painting of philosophers. It is a prime example of men with authority using their power to keep women from being seen as having value equal to men.

In the final version, Painting Raphael painted Hypatia with some guy leering creepily at her. As if to say you can't have a woman in a painting without her being a distraction. Ugh.


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It is becoming easier to find out about women from history - but it takes effort - and knowing where to look.

Hypatia has a place at Judy Chicago's Dinner Party:


In addition to creating a great space for the "Dinner Party" (which is one resource for finding about some historical women), The Brooklyn Museum (& Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art) has a great website. It's great to be able to revisit the exhibit from home.

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond. - Hypatia

Larry Poons

Duetto (2007)

(2007)

(2008)

Not suprisingly - Poons liked Mondrian and Barnett Newman when he was making his (moving) dot paintings. And was influenced by music. Didn't know about Pollock at the time. Now his paintings have a more Pollock sense about them - but with some of the same ideas about colors.

Via A Sky filled with Shooting Stars

From his interview with Robert Ayers:

When I think back, the dots used to blip around, they never stood still. If you looked at a dot picture and then turned away, your eyes got rested, so when you came back to it, it was an entirely different color until your eyes got saturated again. It changed. And some of these new paintings have that. They move around. They change visually. And I’m not talking about just a little thing, it’s the whole thing.

When I’m working on them sometimes I’ll put some color on and I walk away and I turn around, and I can’t even see it. It’s disappeared. When that happens I’m always quite happy because then I know that the painting is in a place where it’s on its own. It’s natural. And I am just a conduit between the paint and the canvas.

Paintings are mistakes. You put a mark on a canvas, and it’s a mistake. Of course it’s a mistake, otherwise it would be wonderful, because it would be finished. But it’s not. After maybe 50 or 60,000 mistakes, you give up. Like Leonardo said, “Works of art aren’t finished, they’re abandoned.” That’s absolutely true, art is never finished. People say, “Oh, that’s a nice romantic thing to say.” But it’s not romantic. It’s like saying that physics can be finished. Real art is never finished. With applied art at least you can say, “OK. You’ve learnt this lesson.” Illustration doesn’t even get into this no-man’s land. But that’s the only place that art lives, if it’s any good.

When you’re painting, then you’ve got nothing to paint until there’s something there, that first mistake. But once you see something – you’ll see a flow or a shape – then that’s what you’re painting, and that’s where paintings come from. And you just try to make them real. And they’re real when they look like they’ve been done all at once. When something happens so that everything that I’ve been looking at in the painting becomes something else very different. All of a sudden little things are visible, things that were invisible before, and the painting doesn’t look like it has a beginning or an end...

The art that we’re talking about is never finished. It can’t be. It isn’t in its nature. When things are finished isn’t a willful thing. Is a Mondrian finished? No. But is a [Fritz] Glarner? Yeah. That’s why a Mondrian’s better. And Mondrian or Glarner, they have no control over this. Beethoven had no control over being that good. Impossible. It wasn’t his fault he was that good. And it wasn’t Pollock’s fault that he was that wonderful. So if somebody says, “Oh, that’s good!” you can’t get a swelled head because you know that if perchance it is any good, that’s almost the way it is – it’s by chance!

...I don’t see them as any kind of paintings, but I do see landscape in them. I might think, “This looks like a mountain,” and I like that. Or something might look like an arm, or a figure, and I love it when it gets like that. It’s not that I put them there, but that’s what color does. Color is light, and that’s all that paintings are about: light. Painting is color. Color is light. The light that’s generated by your favorite painting, that’s what you’re responding to.

From the Tim Kane at the Times Union:

Larry Poons' multitude of searing colors -- chartreuse, construction-sign orange and stoplight red, among them -- jostle for dominance in his big and busy canvases. Ultimately, not a single one takes over, reaching an agreement, as if he's a conductor reigning in discordant voices in an atonal symphony.

"Before you knew you owned it"

by Alice Walker

Expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
become a stranger
To need of pity
Or, if compassion be freely
Given out
Take only enough
Stop short of urge to plead
Then purge away the need.

Wish for nothing larger
Than your own small heart
Or greater than a star;
Tame wild disappointment
With caress unmoved and cold
Make of it a parka
For your soul.

Discover the reason why
So tiny human midget
Exists at all
So scared unwise
But expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.

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I'm watching Alice Walker on Democracy Now. She has such a calm presence and quiet wisdom. A great wise-woman model for us all.

The Art of Barry Gealt

EastPoint-PrinceEdwardIsland (2008)

Greenich Beach II-PEI (2008)


I noticed the Art of Barry Gealt perhaps 10 years ago or so.

He is a professor Emeritus from IU-Bloomington (lives in Owen County, Indiana).

I no doubt saw his paintings in a faculty exhibition there. Later I noticed IU's "Friends of Art" was offering a field trip to his studio and I went. I enjoyed seeing several large scale paintings he was working on - in the space that he had. I also noticed that he used a cold wax medium.

He has used various other things since to enhance the texture of his work. I believe that he builds up a texture and then begins painting. I think he used to build up layers of paint - which no doubt took a lot of paint and medium.

One thing that I've liked about his work is the way in which he uses the materials to suggest nature - in addition to the illusionistic use of paint. Some of his paintings are more abstract than others (ie. the center image).

Thoughts on Feminist Art 2/2010

During February I went to 2 Symposiums put on by the Feminist Art Project - One in Chicago and one in New Harmony, Indiana.

There was an art exhibit in New Harmony at the Contemporary Gallery, associated with the Symposium. It was a juried show - where the criteria was Feminist Art - without a description - so it was left up to one's own interpretation.

Some Feminist art - especially as described by one of the art historians in Chicago - is pretty far out there. Essentially pornography as art. The Wikipedia page of the "Feminist Art Movement" features a photo of a naked Carolee Schneemann performing her piece Interior Scroll.

Artists featured at the Chicago event included an artist who became a "cheerleader" for feminism, and a panel of "lesbian" artists (one did not identify with that label - I don't think any were esp. interested in being categorized in that way).

The artists that were chosen to be included in the New Harmony exhibit included some who used stitching (tying their art to women's crafts (as Margarita Cabrera does), artists such as Kathryn Waters and Sarah Bielski with paintings of interiors and latches, and artists including Mary Ann Michna who painted images of cheerleaders and such.

I like Bielski's painting of the hallway with the cast shadow of the unseen plant on the wall with the photos of men (where you could only see the ties). It could be in a business or a school - some sort of institution.

The women artists on the panel in Chicago were more abstract in what they did. One mainly making textures, others with some recognizable images.

From reading the juror's statement in the New Harmony show - Ester Adler seemed to be trying to find groups or categories to put the women in. This seems rather restrictive to me. I suppose it's one of those things that art historians like to do - but it seems like that can leave out some of the more creative and original artists.

One artist - Jane Case Vickers, with her Roadside Debris Brooch with Crystal, made with exploded tire treads and crystal, was an artist that I could relate to. Bringing together a traditional woman's object and making a statement with the discards of society mixed with something like crystals.

It was interesting to know of Yara Cluver's work. She spoke in New Harmony, she works at IU. Her photo collage of her breasts with a babies head created quite the controversy at Depaw, apparently. The "authorities" were not comfortable with the image going out on a brochure for the art exhibit. It seemed pretty tame to me. Perhaps it upset the Mother/Whore dichotomy too much for some people.

Thinking about how Feminist Art was presented and essentially defined by these two Symposiums, I think that visual art by women can be overshadowed and essentially lost with the inclusion of Naked Women Performance Art, in a similar way in which it is lost in relation to men's art. In fact, I'm not entirely sure that Naked Women Performance Art is essentially different in effect from men's art. The patriarchy is still in place. Women's bodies are objects, they have power as sexual objects - on men and on women (especially lesbian women, obviously).

While I fully support the concept of challenging many of the existing premises regarding women (and our expected place in society), the shock value of women presenting their body pornographically and/or of a woman pulling a scroll out her vagina ends up rendering the rest of "Feminist Art" relatively mute. It may be the most helpful to consider those types of female activist art, Feminist Art - but to still want Woman's Art to have an equal place with Men's Art. In fact - while the the New Harmony exhibit was called Feminist Art of Indiana, the title of the Symposium referred to "Woman's Art" - not Feminist.

Some women worry about how the "F-word" has been defined by others. But I think that organizations such as the Feminist Art Project have to consider their role, as well. The way Feminism and Feminist Art is defined in Chicago affects the way it is perceived in New Harmony.