FOR THE WARMING OF AN ARTIST'S STUDIO - (By David Wagoner, American Poet)The previous tenant, runing out of business,Bolted the...
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A book I highly recommend. It is about ART – the integrity of the artist and the truth of their Art, a...
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We will bring all different reading/interpretations but at the end we are left with the material.Materiality – at times inability...
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Part of my Final Assessment for End of Year Exhibition by tutor Peter Adsett. “…You have taken on the space exceptionally...
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Someone stole my 'pony tail' pot plant from outside my front door step:( I hope they needed it more than...
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Since the end of my studies in June 2007 I have been working with the new materials which I discovered...
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I finally (and sadly) finished my precious one year study with my great tutor Peter Adsett. I thank Peter for...
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What a great night! On arrival to the venue, I took a quick look around at the final result of the...
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What a BUSY 6 weeks it's been! It all started when my brother Vena offered financial support and encouraged me...
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"The paintings exhibit strength in a resolute style of work; with radiant forms emerging and dissolving out of equally radiant...
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Pictures of Nothing, Abstract Art Since Pollock by Kirk Varnedoe
A book I highly recommend. It is about ART – the integrity of the artist and the truth of their Art, a dialogue with their materials. It is Art that challenges Art. How one artist’s response to another’s work differs from the response of another. How have these different responses affected the language of art? What is Art in these responses? Kirk Varnedoe asks, “What is abstract art good for?”
Kirk Varnedoe (1946-2003) was Professor of Art History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from 2001 until his death. From 1989 to 2001 he was Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.Extract from Chapter 6, Abstract Art Now
“A corollary to the idea that the generator of the new is found in private visions is the idea that abstract art-far from speaking to those things that unite us, to what we all have in common-is generated precisely from giving the greatest vent to those things that make us individually different and separate from each other. And it is by this very process that it re-energizes our shared culture. This freedom and individualism in the creation of art is an irritant, like so much sand thrown into our shells. And for all the sand that we put up with, we get fantastic results, pearls!
Abstraction has been less a search for the ultimately meaningful, as I have described it, than a recurrent push for the temporarily meaningless: that is, things that are found not often in exotic realms but rather on the edges of banality, familiarity, and the man-made world. It is the production of forms of order that are not recognizable as order, but vehicles of feeling that seem impersonal, vessels of intelligence that appear utterly dumb. Abstract art is a symbolic game, and it is akin to all human games: you have to get into it, risk and all, and this takes a certain act of faith. But what kind of faith? Not faith in absolutes, not a religious kind of faith. A faith in possibility, a faith not that we will know something finally, but a faith in not knowing, a faith in our ignorance, a faith in our being confounded and dumbfounded, a faith fertile with possible meaning and growth.
From this field of not knowing, from our ignorance, from our dumbfoundedness and disorientation, artists get us into the history of our culture, make our culture go. They produce from the form of things defamiliarized, from our refocus on the things we thought we knew, from the banal, from the points between A and B, from all those momentary interstices where we have no category and no form of understanding. They produce our fresh understanding of the world of culture as separate from nature, as separate from the clock of events in the rest of history: separate by moving faster and stimulating us to change when we least expect it, and slower by linking us to traditions in the past, different from the clocks that tick away in our own lives.”