"His reliance on the grid anchors his work to the architecture of the canvas, as his saturated color palette recalls the tawdry glamour of Los Angeles, the artists’ home. "

-Robert Overby: Paintings from the 80's





"if they could see me now, booming and zooming,
if they could see me now, booming and zooming" (here)


Fredericks & Freiser and Andrew Kreps Gallery are pleased to collaborate on an exhibition of Robert Overby’s late paintings. Paintings from the 80’s will include a selection of Overby’s large-scale works that constitute the artist’s last major series.

Beginning in 1969, Robert Overby (1935–1993) produced an eclectic body of work that was rarely exhibited in his lifetime. Despite a diversity of mediums and an equally wide range of subject matter, Overby returned consistently to the human form. His polyurethane stretches and ghost-like latex casts of walls and doors belong to the history of late 60’s and early 70’s experiments in anti-form, process art, and post-minimalism. His 1980’s image paintings are post Pop combinations of figure and abstraction that explore similar issues of surface, decay, and the skin between the real and its incorporeal other.

Overby’s paintings recall both the acuity of renaissance-style painting and that of graphic design. His reliance on the grid anchors his work to the architecture of the canvas, as his saturated color palette recalls the tawdry glamour of Los Angeles, the artists’ home. Simultaneously culled from high-end fashion magazines and pornography, the women of Overby’s quasi-figurative paintings are disembodied from the forms they suggest. Additionally, the shapes that impose themselves upon their bodies and faces further enhance this sense of removal.






----------------

Upon his return from the exhibition,
the young artist vowed to become a “modern” artist. "

Stuart Davis, 1913

Stuart Davis (1892-1964)
Torso and Head of Two Figures, 1928 Ink and pencil on paper

"In 1913, he was invited to participate and attend the International Exhibition of Modern Art (also known as the Armory Show). Davis later recalled that he was “enormously excited by the show” and was deeply affected by the post-Impressionist works by Gaugin, Van Gogh, and Matisse that were on display. Upon his return from the exhibition, the young artist vowed to become a “modern” artist. "


(from here)

American landscape 1932

"Gloucester … was the place I had been looking for. It had the brilliant light of Provincetown, but with the important additions of topographical severity and the architectural beauties of the Gloucester schooner. The schooner is a very necessary element in coherent thinking about art. I do not refer to its own beauty of form, but to the fact that its masts define the often empty sky expanse. They function as a color-space coordinate between earth and sky … From the masts of schooners the artist eventually learns to invent his own coordinates, when for some unavoidable reason they are not present."




-Stuart Davis










----------------------

I carry my landscapes around with me....
- Joan Mitchel...

“The Last Decade,” an exhibition of fourteen paintings
by Joan Mitchell produced during the last ten years of her life.
November 13 - December 23, 2010

Then, Last Time IV, 1985

A day once dawned, and it was beautiful
A day once dawned from the ground
Then the night she fell
And the air was beautiful
The night she fell all around
So look see the days, The endless colored ways
Go play the game that you learnt
From the morning

via here....
(nick drake)

Sunflowers, 1990-1991

"...and like van Gogh, who painted his iconic sunflowers following his move from Paris to Arles, Mitchell began to paint sunflowers when she relocated from Paris to the Seine valley, where they thrive.


With Sunflowers (1990–1991), a lushly hued diptych on unprimed canvas, she captures both the sense of promise that the flowers inspired in her, together with the intimation of their limited lifespan. During the last ten years of her life, she frequently revisited this motif, commenting that she wanted her paintings "to convey the feeling of the dying sunflower."



from the Gagosian press release here..

Yves, 1991, oil on canvas

Joan Mitchell was born in Chicago in 1925 and studied at Smith College and The Art Institute of Chicago. She moved to France in the late 1950s and in 1967 she settled in Vetheuil, where she lived until her death in 1992.

I carry my landscapes around with me....
- Joan Mitchel...

“The Last Decade,” an exhibition of fourteen paintings
by Joan Mitchell produced during the last ten years of her life.


----

YHBHS Interview
K e n W e a t h e r s b y

"I’m wary of the idea of perfection"


perfect (per-fekt)
accurate, exact, or correct in every detail: a perfect copy.

161 The Neutral (smpl) 2008



---------

Ken Weathersby's work dabbles in doubles, architectural tensions, and subtle contradictions. There is a certain pleasure in his visible wooden canvas supports. His practice is transparent, from the photographic documentation to the ability to hang his canvases on either side. The final works appear to convey ease, though any "maker" can see these are carefully and detailed constructions that require careful planning!

To think about Ken's work is to imagine buildings in collapse or perhaps being rebuilt. His work has been a huge influence for me, and for this blog, and I honestly couldn't be more thrilled to post this interview. Thank you Ken....

----------------

On some levels, your work is about balance and beauty. On the other hand it appears to be about control, and a desire to be in a "perfected absence." Is there a balance between these two states of thinking? What crosses your mind when you are making work?


I am attracted by your phrase “perfected absence”, although I’m wary of the idea of perfection… but certainly an absence, or a negation. If the thing can sort of collapse into nothing, not do anything that it doesn’t also take away, be made, but also be effaced, then I am interested in that. This sort of compression or self-cancelling quality relates to the physical questioning of the surface of the painting vs. the body and back of the painting-- the painting burrowing in on itself, or presenting then negating itself. I suppose that implies a kind of balance understood as symmetry.

177 (gothic marxism) 2010

I first became infatuated with your work from reading your site, and looking at images of your work being put together. How important is the process in your work? Can you describe the process of making these complicated works?


The first part of the process is an idea, these strange little ideas that come as I’m going to sleep or driving, or watching a film, and I do quick notes and sketches on 4” x 6” cards. They are usually something simple and in a way perverse. It might be something like: “a painting with two backs and no front”. Lots of these little thoughts come up, more than I can follow through with, but for the ones that I will realize, it is then about working out all the considerations of how would such a thing look and how would it be made. I am always trying to keep it simple but it almost invariably becomes complex, convoluted. I think the later steps in this process, all the building and finessing of materials, must be important to me, but I don’t like the idea of process being made into an end in its self.

150 2006 acrylic on canvas with inset canvases 30" x 40"




-------

At the same time dealing with real materials, how they interact, simple problems of how to make something hold together—all that is very engaging and not insignificant. Making this weird thing that arose as an idea exist in the real world leads me think in different ways and find out all kinds of little things about wood and glue and cutting metal and layering. My engagement with it has something to do with focused attention, patience and foreseeing contingencies, related to engineering-type thinking I associate with my father. A lot of it is re-inventing the wheel, but I don’t care about the craft of it abstractly, only as it pertains to my needs, yet that can be thoroughly engaging. Often I end up photographing stages of these little technical steps, just because they are surprising to me, and I think they look interesting when I step back from them.

163 (d & g) 2009 32" x 41"
Two-sided painting. It can hang with either side (above, or next image) visible.

--------

Your work blurs the line between sculpture and painting. The work you so graciously donated to the LACE auction could be viewed from the front and back. I found myself wanting others to see it from both sides. Do you work both sides of the canvas and supports on purpose, or is this a byproduct of the design? Have you ever considered showing your works so that your audience can see both sides?


Since I deal with the real space of painting, people seem to wonder about the relationship to sculpture. Sometimes I do allow the both sides of the painting to be seen in some way. Like in the paintings 153 (c & a), or 163 (d & g), the painting is paired with another part that, in a way, shows what is hidden, or almost shows it. But it remains about painting, not sculpture.

For me it all comes out of the given aspects of painting as a tradition, as a medium and as a set of conventions. Paintings are generally, normally considered one-sided, visual, they have parts meant to be seen (the colored paint, seen from the front) and parts not meant to be seen (the back of the linen or canvas, the staples, the wood stretchers, etc.) Things I’m doing seem to work in relation to that. It’s not that I want to emphasize the idea of the importance of painting, or celebrate the tradition (I find that boring). It’s more that it’s just this medium and set of conventions I’m intimate with. I’ve looked at paintings and made paintings for a while now, and I can use that familiarity to create kind of suspended or unresolved situations. Seeing the back of a painting or being denied access to an image or part of an image in a painting is one thing. If I was making sculpture it wouldn’t be the same since we know that all sides of sculpture are usually intended to be seen, and there are always parts of it that can’t be seen from a particular view. I think my paintings would be boring as sculptures; the element of wrongness would be taken away.

179 (twnR) 2010

179 (twnR - detail) 2010

The last few paintings I've made 178 (hLLL), 179 (twnL) and its mate, 179 (twnR), are moving into the space in between the paint and the linen. The wood structure, instead of being a support for the fabric, has actually in this case snuck in between and opened up a space, but to me it’s a space that’s not there, or is there, but isn’t real, because it’s not supposed to be there in the language of painting, which is what this whole object is made of. So after all of this dealing with materials and talk of things about artistic conventions, that’s a part of what I’m after, that no-space space. To me it’s close to what I find excitingly expressed in other mediums, too.

For an example from film, there is the place that is there but not there in the back of the movie studio in David Lynch’s “Inland Empire”, a whole world one can go into, but it doesn’t exist.

-----------

151 2007 151(above) is a two-sided painting
and can hang with either side toward the wall.

What do the titles of your paintings reference?

My titles are mostly meant to be functional rather than expressive, as a way of keeping track of the work, and having something to call it, but then a certain expressiveness sneaks back in. They are numbered in the sequence in which they are made. The letters in parentheses are more of a private marker, since I can't always keep all the numbers straight even in my own mind for paintings I may have done several years ago. The letters refer to private nicknames. The titles develop out of both public function and a private function, and there's an aspect of transparency and of something that's more hidden, I guess, as in the paintings visually.

176 (ocg) 2010

The grid. The square. They continue to populate your work! Why are you attracted to the grid (the square)?


I think I arrive, and re-arrive there in a negative way. It’s partly about what it offers visually as a pattern, but also a lot about what it is not. First, I just need something to mark the front of the canvas as “front”, since that distinction between the differing roles of the sides of the object matters to me. Along with that there are the optical phenomena that emerge from the painted part of my paintings-- moiré patterns, after images, etc. start a suggestion of a spatial dimension that departs from the surface perceptually (while the physicality of the thing as a whole denies that possibility). As loaded iconographically as geometric patterns can be for historical reasons, in some ways they still offer an idea of neutrality. In a literal sense it's the simplest most uninflected way I can think of to mark the surface as painted without evoking expressive gesture, or an undesired representational space, or any number of other things.





What artist do you draw from, and are inspired by?

I look at everything. Siennese Renaissance painting has been very important to me, especially Giovanni Di Paolo. The whole trajectory of minimalism has been of interest. I studied with George Ortman as a graduate student. He was an important artist at the very beginning of that movement as a pivotal influence for Donald Judd.

Ortman did a lot in his paintings with the relationship between the visual and the object quality of painting, things that took years to emerge as something I could see as an influence in my own work. I look at all the painting going on around me, too many things to name. I’m into Chris Ware’s graphic novels right now, their slowness, formal inventiveness and difficulty. I read his book “Jimmy Corrigan” recently. I’m also looking a lot at film. My wife Michele Alpern (also an artist) has a background in studying film. She’s taught me a lot, and we’ve continued to explore that together.

Just lately I’ve been crazy about the films of Chantal Akerman. A painting idea that keeps popping up in my sketchbooks lately came somehow from watching one of her films from the 70's, Hotel Monterrey.



thank you ken!




YHBHS Interview
K e n W e a t h e r s b y



go to Ken's blog here for updates regarding shows
and works in progress....









--------------------------

Los Angeles: 4 paintings
November spawned a monster.

For those that delight in painting, Los Angeles is a lucky place to live this month.
maple leaves, and kool-aid delusions.

Joan Mitchell, Maple Leaves Forever 1968 at Gagosian, Beverly Hills,
now till Nov 6... "Masters of the Gesture."

























Katharina Grosse
Mr. Caplan, Nov 6 2010 - Jan 8 2011,
Christopher Grimes Gallery, Los Angeles

(she's back in LA! seems she might be working on the canvas
and not the walls this time around....)

Kyle Field November 6 – December 18, 2010

Taylor De Cordoba is pleased to present Waxing Marks, an exhibition
of new works on paper by San Francisco-based artist and musician, Kyle Field.

Tyler Vlahovich
I Drank the Kool Aid November 5 - December 4
at WPA Los Angeles....

Los Angeles: painting

November spawned a monster.
For those that delight in painting, Los Angeles is a lucky place to live this month.
maple leaves, and kool-aid delusions.




-----------------

Matt Connors
new work
"You Don’t Know"












Matt Connors
You Don’t Know, October 22 – November 21
at Canada, go here..

you lucky new yorkers!
this Friday..






---------------------------

Lesley Vance
Los Angeles & London
"a cerebral, elegant riff on still-life history."












"Lesley Vance featured in the 2010 Whitney biennial but is new to London. Los Angeles gallerist David Kordansky is showing a dozen smallish oil-on-linen compositions whose pressured, wet, long, heavy strokes fold in and out of each other, creating abstract forms of terrific sculptural density.

Sombre colours – browns, blacks, greens, occasional lemon or pink – and a backlit, inner luminosity recall 17th-century Spanish still-life painting, which Vance cites as an influence. Kordansky mentions “a European vibe to the work”, though Vance plays tradition at one remove: she arranges items such as rocks and shells, photographs them, then works from the image, abstracting, compacting: a cerebral, elegant riff on still-life history."





article via financial times, oct 15....

image above untitled 14,
via david kordasnky....











-----------------------

Nicolas Carone,
1917-2010

"One of the last surviving Abstract Expressionist painters,
died on July 15 at his home in Hudson, N.Y."
















"Mr. Carone was present at the beginning of the New York School and friends with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Lee Krasner. But his best work may have come long after the style faded, in the large paintings in shades of black, white and gray that he made during the last two or three decades of his life. The shifting lines and layered brushwork of these works most completely integrated the classical figurative tradition he absorbed during his earliest art studies and the instinctive painting processes of Abstract Expressionism.



Mr. Carone was born in June 4, 1917, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the eldest of seven children of Italian immigrants. He grew up in Hoboken, N.J., where his father was a bartender, and began drawing at age 4. When he was around 11, his mother sent him to the Leonardo da Vinci Art School on East 10th Street in Manhattan, which offered instruction for a small tuition. "




read Roberta Smith's NYT article here..







---------------------

Sigmar Polke
1941-2010

Sigmar Polke,
via NYTIMES



Sigmar Polke, an artist of infinite, often ravishing pictorial jest, whose sarcastic and vibrant layering of found images and maverick, chaos-provoking painting processes left an indelible mark on the last four decades of contemporary painting, died yesterday in Cologne, Germany. He was 69; the cause was complications of cancer, according to Gordon Veneklasen, a partner at the Michael Werner Gallery New York, the artist’s chief American representative.

"Sigmar Polke is an artist whose work defies easy definitions. He is one of the most significant painters of the post-war generation, yet his career has by no means been confined to painting. Since the early 1960s Polke has experimented with a wide range of styles and subject matter, bringing together imagery from contradictory or unexpected sources, both historical and contemporary, and using a variety of different materials and techniques. In fact Polke’s artistic diversity, and his resistance to any form of categorisation, has been seen as the only consistent theme in his work."

via the tate
modern....






--------------

YHBHS Interview with Jeffrey Scott Mathews

....
"The new (ancient) age"

Untitled (/x\) 2010

I think it was one night not too long ago. Late, late into the night, when I first
found myself staring at Jeffrey Scott Mathew's paintings. Maybe my eyes were exhausted from staring at the screen, but Jeffrey's paintings seemed to be melting in front of my eyes. Perhaps it was Max Richter's score that was lulling me into a dream state, or maybe it was just the hour.

Their lines blurry, and fuzzy, bouncing upon the surface almost like an analogue melodic beat might. Their strong geometric lines reminded me of fantastic wallpapers, or some
sort of psychedelic tapestry that would be draped over a chair.


Yet their painted surfaces seem to be destroyed with these metallic puddles of good(evil)ness!?!



Bi83, I wondered wtf?
and Binary rainbows,and twilight thinkers, I was hooked!
Sign me up for this afterlife, please.




-----------------

Untitled (Drctnl Decomposition), 2010

What is bi83 and marker bleed? Will you talk about your process for making this series of work? Bi83 is the name for the heavy metal bismuth as it is found on the periodic table of elements. Bismuth has a rich cultural history as both a metaphysical healing property and as an element with many commercial applications(it is the active ingredient in Pepto-Bismol). The reason that I choose to work with the material is that it forms stair-step or hopper crystals as it cools. It has a low melting point so it is possible to drip and draw with the material on linen or canvas. As the molten metal cools, crystals form and the material forms a bond with the linen. I appreciate the component of organic structure occurring after chaotic and almost expressionistic gestural painting.

Untitled (Binary Rainbow), 2010

The marker-bleed refers to my use of markers on linen that are compromised by water or chemical agent, allowing the pigment to bleed and saturate into the linen. I see this as another level of the process or systemic organization being disrupted by natural phenomena. Due to the fact that I work with chance there is always a high possibility of failure. This makes things both exciting and precarious as I am constantly building things up in order to break them down. I think this collaboration with nature is vaguely reminiscent of my background in experimental processes with photography.

The work is both a recording and an experiment. Ultimately, each work is the residue of an ongoing investigation with infinite possibilities. who are you inspired by? I'm heavily inspired by the sort of formal enthusiasm typified by late 60's minimalism where artists were working with space-age industrial materials in order to subvert their function within the military industrial complex. I'm also inspired by the science fiction writing of JG Ballard and his elemental cycle, which encapsulates positivist ideas about geophysical change and its relevance to psychological transformation.




You seemed to be drawn toward the 11 x 14 format. Any particular reasons? I feel like the scale of an 11x14 inch painting makes it more personal and less monumental. I am not opposed to monumental works, but the scale seemed appropriate for the intricacy of the crystals that form on the surface of these paintings. I am, however, constantly learning new ways to manipulate the bismuth, so I think a scale upgrade will occur when I am capable of cultivating larger crystals. As the means of control grow, so grows the system.

Untitled (Scapeland), 2010

Is your home messy or neat? I live in an apartment in Brooklyn with my girlfriend who is also an artist. We keep things neat when we can, although she is in the early stages of initiating a rooftop garden, so dirt is everywhere.

I also work from home, so my studio vacillates between being organized and efficient and adversely sloppy and crystal laden, much like my paintings!













Talk about twilight thinker, and binary rainbow... where do you titles come from? I title the works "Untitled" with parenthetical titles for descriptive or reference purposes. The referential titles are sometimes formally descriptive, and sometimes arbitrary. "Twilight Thinker" is actually a chapter in (Anti-) philosopher Emil Cioran's book "A Short History of Decay", which I am currently reading.

In this chapter Cioran states " Finding ourselves at a point symmetrical to the agony of the ancient world, a victim of the same sicknesses and under similarly ineluctable charms, we see the great systems destroyed by their limited perfection... We have come with our own death to the doors of philosophy: rotting on their hinges, having nothing more to protect, they open of their own accord..."















If you could have one dream next door neighbor, who would you want to move in next door? I think my dream neighbor would have to be either tolerant of noisy drone music or deaf, because my current neighbors are definitely not down with the kind of music i listen to. Maybe I would want the neighbor to be an intellectual musician Tony Conrad, Terry Riley, or Steve Reich. Music is important to me because it is all process. I like experiential sounds that inspire a sort of be-here-now existentialist state of mind. So, yeah some kind of new age person...



------------------------







thank you Jeffrey for having this conversation!
see more of Jeffrey Scott Mathews' work here..









-------------------------------

WA L L W O R K S

Paul
Morrison:
black
and
white

Paul Morrison
(these wallworks have always excited me.)



Morrison lives and works in London. He is best known for his large monochromatic botanical landscapes that are at once both familiar and foreign: Familiar because his subjects—trees, flora, and their natural surroundings—are immediately recognizable, and foreign because he can cause a mere dandelion or weed to become threatening due to its immense size and lack of color. All his images are painted in two coats of acrylic paint.

They are then scanned into a computer, manipulated and projected onto the canvas. The different elements tend to be disproportionate in size: tiny plants become huge, while massive trees shrink. This is called 'cognitive landscape'

images via
cheim and reid.... new york

Paul
Morrison:
black
and
white

C h r i s M a r t i n

chris
martin
at
daniel
weinberg
may 1 - may 29

CHRIS MARTIN
Tree
1986-2009
Oil on canvas 38" x 24






----




"It's like being inside and outside at the same time. On the one hand you are in trance, on the other hand you are watching yourself paint. And I think the key is that when you are watching yourself paint you don't judge, you just watch. The less I judge the more I can actually create and see what I'm doing. "



-------




"I wish we could all wish for not knowing what we are doing. But in a good way. I think there's a sense of freedom that comes from everybody not being too sure what they're doing. Someone once said about New York in the early 1950s, late '40s, after Expressionism was sort of bursting onto the scene, "There was a moment, maybe six weeks or so, when no one had any idea how to make a painting." And that's a lovely idea, that we don't know what we're doing…"






(I missed the show last summer at Micthell-Innes and Nash,
but really excited to see Chris Martin's work here in Los Angeles.)







Chris Martin....

-------

W A D E G U Y T O N

homes,
tumblers,
and
the
black.



























homes,
tumblers,
and
the
black.

1. Wade Guyton
2. Wade Guyton and Kelley Walker: Tumblers A set of six glass tumblers by artists Wade Guyton and Kelley Walker, printed with metallic patterns. Bottoms up! SOLD OUT! (boo!)
via ooga booga store here in los angeles!




...

The Dream Machine

Brion Gysin
1916-1986

"I enjoy inventing things out of fun.
After all, life is a game, not a career."

Brion Gysin and William Burroughs
with the Dream Machine....




"A dreamachine is "viewed" with the eyes closed: the pulsating light stimulates the optical nerve and alters the brain's electrical oscillations. The "viewer" experiences increasingly bright, complex patterns of color behind their closed eyelids. The patterns become shapes and symbols, swirling around, until the "viewer" feels surrounded by colors. It is claimed that viewing a dreamachine allows one to enter a hypnagogic state.

This experience may sometimes be quite intense, but to escape from it, one needs only to open one's eyes."

close your eyes....

"In its original form, a dreamachine is made from a cylinder with slits cut in the sides. The cylinder is placed on a record turntable and rotated at 78 or 45 revolutions per minute. A light bulb is suspended in the center of the cylinder and the rotation speed allows the light to come out from the holes at a constant frequency of between 8 and 13 pulses per second.

This frequency range corresponds to alpha waves, electrical oscillations normally present in the human brain while relaxing."











Nothing Is True -
Everything Is Permitted:

The Life of Brion Gysin\




"The multimedia artist, poet and novelist
Brion Gysin may be the most influential cultural figure
of the twentieth century that most people have never heard of."


more here...

Portrait of Brion Gysin....


Brion Gysin was a painter, writer, sound poet, and performance artist born in Taplow, Buckinghamshire. He is best known for his rediscovery of the cut-up technique, used by William S. Burroughs. With Ian Somerville he invented the Dreamachine, a flicker device designed as an art object to be viewed with the eyes closed. It was in painting, however, that Gysin devoted his greatest efforts, creating calligraphic works inspired by Japanese and
Arabic scripts.








-------------------------



Burroughs later stated that
"Brion Gysin was the only man I ever respected."



-------------------

New Work.
Matt Connors.
2009.













































Sikkema Jenkins and Co. here
Matt Connors, Arturo Hererra, Merlin James Building on a Cliff
December 10, 2009 - January 23, 2010

Zhang Enli
oil on canvas
c /o Hauser and Wirth here.

color
push.






































Saskia Leek
via Ivan Anthony Gallery, here.
all images, 2009, oil on board.

want to bathe in this color!

mary
heilmann

deep space.

the bourgeoisie are falling in love with them (her paintings)
and that's very troubling actually..

mary heilmann

Interview with Ross Bleckner and Mary Heilmann, taken from here.

Ross:Does it strike you as peculiar that you get up for 35 years, and all you think about is you, your work, the perpetuation of your work, its safe keeping, its dissemination into the world, its reception…

Mary:And who doesn’t like it. (laughter)

Ross: And who likes it. Does the self-centeredness of that sometimes bother you?

Mary: It never bothered me, that’s why I’ve been so happy to be on my own all this time; I didn’t want to move to the suburbs and have a family and take care of the children, the husband, and all that. I know that it was an extreme case of selfishness, and I don’t know where I ever got the idea that it was okay, but I never had any question about that. It probably comes from my Catholic upbringing. As a little kid I was extremely interested in the spiritual life and in the lives of the saints. I wanted to be a saint. There was nobody in their story except them and God and that was a model for me.

Ross: That’s a very good answer.

Mary: And it hasn’t changed much, you know.

Ross: Some things don’t, especially those early models. You were saying when the tape was off that you wished there was another way of describing that work process for artists, because although it is a self-absorption, it’s not for selfish reasons. In fact, you see it as essentially bringing joy to other people.

Mary: Right—Like the Bruce Nauman piece The Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths. Oh, and the other very big part of my work life is teaching at SVA. I see that as helping young people.

.

"The real purpose of painting
is to give pleasure"

- Robert Ryman

"white has a tendency to make things visible."

Robert Ryman
(via and-a-half here)
and art 21, volume 4, here.



"It is part of Robert Ryman’s legend that he is a self-taught artist. He moved to New York in 1952, at age twenty-two, to pursue a career in jazz. A year later, he took a job at the Museum of Modern Art as a security guard. Paintings had begun to interest him “not so much because of what was painted but how they were done. I thought maybe it would be an interesting thing for me to look into—how the paint worked and what I could do with it.” So he bought some art supplies and began to experiment. At no point, then or later, did he try to depict anything—a face, a figure, a natural object like a tree or a flower, an artifact like a bottle or a guitar: “I thought I would try and see what would happen. I wanted to see what the paint would do, how the brushes would work. . . . I had nothing really in mind to paint. I was just finding out how the paint worked, colors, thick and thin, the brushes, surfaces.” He evidently found the activity sufficiently absorbing that he put music aside. By the end of the ’50s, Ryman was using white paint almost exclusively, as if color interested him far less than certain physical properties of paint. He had developed a signature style."

via bookforum here.