Fixing on a Picasso painting at all directly -- not swiveling away to this or that fact of the love life or cult of personality -- and asking the question 'What understanding of the person and situation depicted seems to be at stake here?' most often leads to places we would rather not go (5).
How perfect a discussion of a painting is this? and what a poetic description of the idea of space! And Clark cautions that this isn't really a full analysis; it is merely an introduction to his idea of Picasso and the space(s) he paints. We look back at the painting with a new sense of discovery. So, I say, let's go with the idea of space, and tenderness. Let's take Clark at his word, and look at a contemporary painter -- using his approach.
This is moving in the direction of the small, the personal. The scratches and drips and layering of the pinks, oranges, greens, blues are alive because the painter's touch is so very evident. Look at the soft, deep horizontal green marks (near the deep gray horizontal brush mark) in the upper left. These greens could be stems, but, because this is an abstract painting, they also can function like the shadows one sees passing over a flowering bush on a summer day. The fact that this work is abstract means that there is room for the viewer to enter and see ... as much as we can, for as long as we remain in front of the work.
This painting seems to have taken the direction of "Untitled, 2012," even further. There are fewer small marks and more overall transparent layers, which, again, amazingly give the painting air. It is a space of "belonging." I often think that all we want, really, is to belong in the space that surrounds us.
Once it leaves the studio, a painting ... acquires a social identity and a life of its own, being priced, bought, sold, loaned, shipped, stored, exhibited, evaluated, restored – an independent object, a possession now belonging to someone else, a commodity which can belong to anyone.
With this in mind, we arrive at the work of Bobbie Burgers. Her exhibition, "Suspended Between Sweetness and Sorrow," has been at the Caldwell-Snyder Gallery in St. Helena over the month of April (there was some discussion of continuing the show for two more weeks) and Burgers will be showing in Stockholm, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver this year.
Full bloom and big enough (both in actual size and in conception) to surround the viewer with flowers at their peak. Burgers' best work is like this, I think: big enough to, as she says, feel "intimate," and in one range of colors so that the mind stays firmly in, say, whites, blues and purples and can really take them in. ("Fewer elements," Picasso told Francois Gilot, 'create s feeling of strength in reserve" – Life with Picasso). Derek Stefan, the very kind and knowledgeable gallery attendant, says he always feels as if the flowers "move." There is background action here... but more on that in a minute. Stay in aesthete mode.
I have noticed that people tend to tiptoe quietly around his work. The rooms are dimly lit and very quiet. And yet we would, if we had been trying to guess the artist's intention, be wrong. Mark Rothko said his paintings were "skins that are shed and hung on a wall" (Breslin's biography, p. 306) and spoke of the "tension" in his work (p. 281) and its exposure of his "despair" (p. 286). Breslin's biography delves sensitively and affectionately into Rothko's depression and its relevance to his art. Skin in the form of paint.
Writers are not immune, either. In a 1988 interview, John Cleese said "If I pick up a book by Bertrand Russell, I find that he is dealing with insights and ideas that have got enormous comic potential, far more than if I start flipping through S. J. Perelman. Because, in a sense, I suppose as you get older you get more interested in the 'Big Jokes.' " Probably not Russell's plan. But humans tend to find comedy and beauty where we can, the painter or writer's intentions be damned.
http://artistinanaframe.blogspot.com/2011/11/artists-statement-viii-something-is.html and there are others in the series. What can we say about our work that will resonate with everyone?
Motherwell has said that, to meet his standards (and I realize we don't have to do that, but it is a good set of standards, so let's go with it for the moment), a painting must reveal what he calls the painter's "consciousness," Part of the truth of a painting is not just the artist's own expressed consciousness, but what she has absorbed, knowingly or not, over a lifetime.
Joan Mitchell comes into Burgers' work in many forms: in that "decorative" first impression, the sheer size and reach of the paintings, in the lines etched here and there in the background, in the long, clear drips. That same clustering of blossoms into an upper corner of the canvas, this top-heavy lush world, immerses the viewer... something about the weight of those colors as they spill off the top of the painting surfaces seems to bring the viewer into the world more fully than, say, a canvas completely filled with color. The spaces leave room for us to come in.
Think, too, of the titles. Again, it's a question of the artist signaling her intention. It isn't about time. It's about that life experience, poured into the background behind the fullness of the flower.