![]() ![]() It was a defining moment for me I then went around the museum, looking at the paintings through this understanding of a perceived depth, trying to decipher the paintings through this 'visual experince' which could actually be called 'sensation'. These paintings came alive in a way that was not just visual, especially those jagged fault lines of Stills compressed next to each other like the surface of a cliff (no pun intended). When visiting the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as a student, I stood in a large room of Clifford Still paintings, they were the large, black, red, yellow and brown paintings from the late fifties, they opened up the room in terms of colour and space, they jumped back and forth, what Hans Hofmann called the ‘push and pull’ of the picture plane. ![]() How important is it that something is from reality or non figurative? The interest for me, lies in what response we receive from the painting, for instance, as a subject matter how interesting are water lilies on the surface of a pond? Is it the way the water lilies are painted that we pick up on or is it the transference of the water lilies into paint onto the surface of the canvas that we some how receive visually? In this way good painting transmits a signal that requires more than just an intellectual response, surely it triggers your visual experience, and that subsequently triggers your emotional response, just like music can. Good painting doesn’t need subject matter. This is often where there is a concern with the modern artist and his/her choice in subject matter. (Photograph ©1997 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, by Kate Keller/Erik Landsberg) Oil on canvas, triptych, each section 6'6" x 14" (200 x 425 cm).The Museum of Modern Art, New York. These are now in the Musee de' l'Orangerie, Paris, at MOMA, New York and London's Tate Modern, to name a few. He suggested many artists have followed in the direction of Monet, perhaps indirectly, and with specific interest in the late and large series of paintings entitled 'Water Lilies’. A debt of gratitude that the art historian Jed Pearl in his article, 'After Monet', Modern Painters, Spring 1993. We can learn a lot from looking at developments taking place little over a hundred years ago by Monet. In this age of instant gratification, perhaps something is being missed here when not standing in front of a real painting. There is an energy in the use of the large expanse of space that these painters brought to modern art, through the interaction of colours, the shapes or gestures that remain on the picture plane. When was the last time you stood infront of a Pollock? This can only be received when standing in front of one of them, yet we know them best through tiny images in books. We read these paintings through the physiological effect that they exhude. The power these paintings reflect through there size is important to painting in the second half of the twentieth century. ![]() There is something of the epic, of Renaissance heroicism, in the large painterly canvases of Pollock, De Kooning, Rothko and Kline. A process that responds to the 'feel' of the painting. For me painting and especially abstraction, is an activity that coalesces the engagement between thought, material and action. Perhaps, I am thinking about the 'letting go', that is required from us as a ‘viewer’ to go beyond just looking. Paintings that require some thought beyond a merely visual reading of the subject matter. I am interested in paintings and not pictures. Hans Namuth, Jackson Pollock in his studio I am thinking beyond any romantic ideas about the smell of linseed oil or turpentine in the studio or the image of the artist out on some kind of action-painting bender drunk on the stuff in a Pollock-like fury. What is it about the act of painting that is so captivating? The process of painting, the creative act of placing pigment on canvas is an extraordinary experience. It corresponds to what we are living through.' Hans Hartung 'A single line, violent, passionate, broken, or beautifully calm, regular, uniform, conveys what we are feeling. ![]() These paintings require more than an intellectual response of a few seconds, they requires 'time', to reflect, to absorb and to respond. My concern is that any aesthetic consideration, when viewing paintings that are abstract in nature, is being starved of oxygen. My frustration is that these paintings are little more than paintings copied from photographs and filled in like a colour by numbers template. Rationale: This essay is responding to the way painting, especially abstraction, is being pumeled to death with the overloading of our senses with paintings of the ironic/Pop Art/icon style. Monet / Cy Twombly / Joan Mitchell / Patrick Heron The significance of a 'lyrical' abstraction in painting by David Moxon: ![]()
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