Interior illusions

Chris made this fabulous comment on my previous White Room experimentation: to look at Matisse and how he arranged objects in space.

And that's what I did. I swiftly made two (in)expensive book purchases... small format, b/w photos and a lot of text on

• Matisse's own writing about art and his art practice: Henri Flam's originally 1973 published collections of Matisse's writings: Matisse - On art (see google books here); and
• A small collection of Matisse's cut-outs with some commentary: Ralf Schiebler, Henri Matisse. Scherenschnitte, Schirmer/Mosel, 1994. (sorry, there's not really much to see about this book online.

So, I've been reading these books on my various journeys across Berlin's public transport system for the past week. I sought out the cut-outs for a variety of hunches: to flatten space, to simplify space and to make objects moveable - to be placed and shaped where one likes. In that, I explicitly ignored Matisse's numerous earlier paintings of decorative still life and the curious games he plays with them with the construction of space.

And thus I stumbled to the extraordinary end point of someone's extraordinary artistic career. Which clearly doesn't make for an easy starting point for someone else. And neither should it.

So: we need a series of diversions, complications and confusions if this is something to work with, on, besides.

Let's start with a couple of his cut-outs. Yes?!

Henri Matisse, The Heart, 1943,
papiers decoupes
Jazz, tablet vii, 44.5x67.3cm
Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris

Note the limited colour scheme; note how the different forms do not touch each other; note that in print the depth of the collages is lost; note how the heart makes the rest of the construction fall out of place - passionately.

It's constructions of space by cut out - the practice of cutting shape into colour - there is little more direct in approach than how Matisse - so late, and after decades of searching - stumbles onto this new medium that in its simplicity provides such clear expression. Playfully innocent and all the same something to arrive at after years of searching.

Henri Matisse, Figures, 1944
papiers decoupes
Jazz, tablet ix, 44.3x67.1cm
Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris

Positive and negative shapes, space; the frame is as important as what is (not) inside. And yet: the positive remains incongruent to the negative; the forms do not match; do not exhaust themselves in each other. Instead, they are subtly changed, amended, rounded, flattened; so: one is not the opposite of the other.

So, I'm standing on the sidelines and my jaw is dropping in awe.
Don't forget to breath, dear
... and now??

Paintings I like - without a horizon

Mark Rothko, Untitled 1969
Acrylic on canvas, 234x200cm
Collection of Christopher Rothko

Mark Rothko's work has a similar effect on me as Joan Eardley's. It just swallows me up... gulp... I'm gone. The paintings are left.

It's quietly sombre contemplative. The scale and the colour are just all that is there. I had been looking forward to the Tate Exhibition and kept wandering through the rooms, back and forth. The scale of paintings, the different series - 15 or so of the Seagram Murals in one room; the Black form paintings, Brown on Grey and Black on Grey. Fabulous.

There were two comments that stuck.

One was a conversation I overheard in the room with the black on black series: such variety in black (red, brown, green and blue ones; opaque, transclucent, matt, shiney). An elderly couple sat next to me. Her emotional response to the black was straightforward: "He must have been such a sad person." And she was clearly distraught by all the black she saw.

That's it. Enough said. You see, you read, you associate painting=painter.

Have a look at the series in question for yourself. The Tate has the exhibition online... here is the link to the Black Form Paintings

Similar to the Twombly exhibition, I had taken an audio guide - actually much more: a nice touch screen, music, stories, additional images. Very nicely done! And not in this room but in a later room, the curator commented on Rothko's association with the Abstract Expressionists. He, the curator was doubtful, commenting along the lines that while Rothko intended and experimented intensely with the evocation of emotional responses by the viewers of his paintings, the paintings themselves don't tell us all that much about Rothko the person, they are thus not particularly expressive/expressionist.

Interesting thought. I'll keep that.

The other one was the commentary on the last series: Black on Grey. In various sizes, formats, different borders surrounding them.

Instruction #1 for that room: This is not a horizon line. Don't read it as such.

Mark Rothko, Untitled 1969
Acrylic on canvas, 206x236cm
Collection of Kate Rothko Prizel

And here is the Black on Grey room

That is difficult - not to read it as horizon line. But I'm trying - and the painting is all the better for it. Brian had commented on abstraction as the barest hint at something, to be filled in. Let me fill that thought a bit further - or take it elsewhere.

• The whole exhibiton is online with a lot of additional material. See the link here
• Casey over at the Colorist has a lot good things to say about Rothko too

St Mary in the Marsh by Mark Leach

St Mary in the Marsh by Mark Leach
Pastel on board, 70x50cm

is greeting me every time I enter my flat. It has had its place at the far wall of the living room for the past two years. It is my window to elsewhere; it's my window onto the fields where I grew up; not just the fields, but them on a hot high summer afternoon; when you can smell the summer as it hits your skin. The kind of summer I haven't had for a long time; but whenever I get a scent of them, once or twice a year, it is so welcome.

St Mary in the Marsh by Mark Leach
Pastel on board, 70x50cm

But for the past two years, I've got a scent, just a hint, of them whenever I enter my flat. Mark's book, Raw Colour with Pastels, had just been published when I stumbled across it on Amazon: a book on pastel, a book about abstract pastel landscapes. And it was ordered. And it proved important, resourceful, inspiring.

It isn't a how to do book but much more of a biographical account of why pastel and colour matter to this artist. It's a bit similar to a good autobiography that isn't really constructed as such.

So, I learned how to prepare my own grounds with pumice powder and acrylics; how to simplify layers and: how to paint fields, lines, more fields, more lines.

St Mary in the Marsh by Mark Leach (Detail)
Pastel on board, 70x50cm

Really, a lot of the first bits of landscape abstraction have come from that.

I discovered that Mark's paintings were still available in a variety of places - as I said, the book had just been out, and thus many of the paintings were still for sale. More by luck than anything else I stumbled across the site for St Mary in the Marsh. Blindly and wholeheartedly I had fallen in love with it. It was the singular colour of the sky - an otherwise ugly salmon pink which in another life was THE colour of the late 1980s and for good reason still has to make its comeback - , the almost halfway horizon line, the yellow of the field and the splashes of cobalt in the foreground. So I did something I hadn't done ever before: I sent him an email, and in the end bought the painting - I don't think I ever told my parents that I did that. In the process, we exchanged a few emails and I had been planning of visiting him in his studio south of London - even remember researching a tedious set of public transport connections to get there from central London.

Dear Gesa, That is wonderful news! I am so glad you are not disappointed. Always a worrying time for me - the photos can be very misleading. The painting has fond memories for me, so I am very pleased it has found a nice home. All the very best for now.. Mark

On 27 Oct 2006, at 10:48, Gesa Helms wrote:

Dear Mark, I got the paintig last night - a neighbour had signed for it while I was out. You can safely cash the cheque! I love it! It's great and there is no way I will be sending it back - those colours and textures (I will have some technique questions a bit later, if I may). It reminds me a lot of where I grew up - north west Germany with flat fields of wheat and barley on a hot summer day - it's the kind of mood you don't really get on the Scottish West coast, but now it'll be in my living room! So many thanks for this! All my best, Gesa

Brian had just written a post about Mark Leach's book. In this he mentioned that Mark had died in early July. Dear Mark, thank you so much for this painting and for the hint of a hot summer afternoon in Bokel in my flat! And for showing me the possibilities for abstraction in landscape, colour and lines and simple fields to paint the things that matter!


Please see Mark Leach's website here: http://www.markleach.net/
And have another look at a good quality shot of St Mary in the Marsh on his website here
An article on Mark's work appeared in the June 2007 edition of the Pastel Journal, with the PDF available here

Paintings I like #2: Bird Cloud, Lyonel Feininger

Lyonel Feininger, Vogelwolke (Wolke nach dem Sturm),1926
Oil on canvas, 44x72cm
Busch-Reisinger Museum, Cambridge, MA

Vogelwolke - Wolkenvogel; Bird Cloud - Cloud Bird.

It was the onomatopoeic [that sounds rather posh for the German lautmalerisch that I had in mind] qualities of the German title of Feininger's painting that kept me occupied when I first saw it: The sounds the words make.
Or was it the vast expanse of the cloud over a low horizon seascape...
Or was it the beauty of the concept: an airy cloud in the shape of a huge bird.
Or was it the yellow of the beach and the lonely figure on the left.

In any case: it's been a firm favourite of mine since I first came across it in print. The format and the rather restrained composition: strong horizontal lines, a single figure to the front left and above it all the majestic cloud, its wings, its beak.

After my sketching of lonely women in the Fogg Museum I ventured around the corner and stumbled right across it. Didn't know it was there, so it was an absolute surprise, gave me goosebumps, made me circle around the painting for ages, up close, far away, almost poking my nose at it, trying to figure out how Feininger made all those lines, variations of colour - restraint and yet so varied. Walk away, went back - in the process almost ignored the excellent German expressionists that hang close by: E-L Kirchner, Otto Mueller, Max Beckmann. Sorry, guys - you'll have to wait until the next time.

It's all about the Vogelwolke/Wolkenvogel today.

Two sketches of the Bird cloud, 1924
(top one in pencil, bottom one in ink and wash)
Also at the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Cambridge, MA

And these I found in my Feininger book: sketches after he saw the Bird after a storm, note how he changed the composition to a horizontal one in the oil painting, done a couple of years after the sketches.

Paintings I like #1: Agrigente, Nicholas de Stael

It's a bit of an indulgent title for a regular feature - Paintings I like - but, I'll stick with it... also on the grounds that I'm not sure how regular and consistent that feature will be ;)

So, one of the spare large journals I had acquired, found a purpose: I don't quite remember where I read it, but it sounded like a fabulous idea: To keep a record of one's favourite pieces of art, along with some thoughts, ideas, and a bit of analysis of why they are favourites. As doing so would be one way of getting to what gets to you, fires your creative imagination and as such can also inform one's own art.

I mean, it's not really revolutionary, that insight - in particular Casey's excellent series of posts on his Wolf Kahn project does exactly that. Take a look here for a collection of his insightful and fascinating posts, along with some stunning new school color pieces of his own.

So, a bit of longwinded prelude for Painting I like #1. It's been only a couple of months back that I stumbled across a catalogue of Nicholas de Stael's work in my Saturday art group. And it completely threw me: those colours, spaces and lines. His work doesn't seem to be too well-known in the UK, if the unavailability of any English publications is something to go by, but I did one with good reproductions and some text in English, alongside the mostly French descriptions of the paintings.

It was de Stael's abstract, and yet figurative landscapes, which preceeded my recent, and continuing forage into Abstract Expressionism.

Enough said - some more saying to follow in due course. But this is my current favourite of de Stael.

Nicholas de Stael, Agrigente, 1953
Oil on Canvas, 73x100cm, Kunsthaus Zurich

A black sky: flat. Hanging over red and grey. How simple. How dramatic. There is some pale yellow around the sharp edges. A splatter of blue in the foreground.

In the process, I came across thisgreat image library which has by far the most extensive collection of de Stael's paintings online - the Spanish site Ciudad de la pintura, with de Stael's paintings at this site here.

The Wild

by Barnett Newman kept me busy over the past few days.

I couldn't get either image or concept out of my head. I had finally ordered a couple of books on Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting - thank you Casey for the good suggestions. They had arrived before the weekend and I had been drinking numerous coffees while looking through them.

Barnett Newman, The Wild, 1950
Oil on canvas, 4.1x243 cm
MoMA

The painting - now, don't mistake the white background as part of it: it isn't. The painting has one of the most unusual dimensions I had come across as a canvas: it's 4.1x243 cms, i.e., almost 60 times higher than wide. Two layers of red painting onto a blue grey background.

In fact, I must have come across it a few years back at the MoMA, but can't remember it - funny, how there seems to be time and place for paintings to hit you when you're (not) ready.

So, there it is: a significant line - bold and tall, decisive in red. It separates - yet at the same time unifies, provides connnections, holds together.

Lines as themes in my own work - they keep my eyes focused, draw attention to move along, to explore what's around: above, below, left and right. As such: how strict an order do they impose?

Back to Newman - a single line in red and its bold title. The title almost intrigues me as much as the format and concept. It makes me smile: this is almost as far away from wild, expressive and spontaneous as I can imagine. And probably therefore it's such a brilliant title.