Verily, in Images We Live
What is my purpose for writing? Your own feet are glued to the ground by shadow. You don't need to read about that. Here I am, drowning in my perception of my perception of perception. Do you want to know that? I have resumed my assumed shape and sit in the same chair as before. It was a nice studio visit, neither here nor there, not specified of any kind. The stir in my cloud chamber has no meaning, no mind, even still your visit hangs in the air about me with the feel of some strange transmutation of energy.
I am not in love with you,
please know that.
Between what is represented and the paint that does the representing, my subject matter is rendered mostly with lines calibrated in abstractness. Between the subjective space of the represented content and the objective area when the content goes unrepresented, a line can disappear into the illusion of depth or it can reenforce plasticity. Lines scoop up space to occupy, scoop up space to leave empty, or when too crude for the subject, mar the surface like the handiwork of a disrespectful passerby. Unlike companions in geometry, a line can be idiosyncratic going for a walk, going for a run or twisting itself into a young girl's parts. It's a moody thing of the hand and drawing the most intuitive of all the fine arts.
A bare, unpainted canvas appears to be some truth. A square is supposedly abstract purity. A prior construct of sense that would be violated by my presence, muddled by my imperfections. My contours captured from nature are chaotic, irrational. I begin making stabs at hardcore objectivity. A newly stretched canvas is a point of terror. I make defensive strikes swinging with the line on a single canvas from drawing to painting, painting to drawing blurring the distinction.
I am egotistical. I indulge in my proclivities while all the while depicting attributes freshly plucked from the garden. Curious interloper, the blood is a nice cadmium red. Fame is vital to redo Art History. If you must know- I paint because I am a feminist.
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I like my painting called narrative abstraction.
Representational work and its degrees of realism require a lot of discipline making many abstract painters appear lazy. Ironic that non-objective painting arrives to the really real, to a found object without any other identity than the materials of construction, the surface upon which the art has been realized, and the realization that art is an object like any other gathering dust. Because art is an opened-ended proposition the way for the abuse of art as a concept is broadening. Because no one can say what art is, a gallery can sell a foam pad for a lot more than the exact same from an upholstery shop, but honestly, don’t we all know art when we see it? The breakaway abstraction of the composition and its components give the strength to the painting regardless the strength of subject matter. Any representational painting can be abstract and any abstract painting can be representational. Non-objective painters believe a portrait of a queen in old-fashioned dress cannot be compared to the timeless virtue of a square. Subject matter provides a starting place for the comprehension of a painting. Personally, I would rather go to bed with the imagination of a surrealist than with that of a square. I am particularly not speaking of beauty in art for which we have a collective but not particular notion. We have representations for beauty, but then we change our minds. Abstract painting leaves off the particular, moves away from identifiable subject matter to the non-specific. In defense, the abstract painter will then speak of the finest feelings that cannot be identified, should not be attached to a person, place or thing, as an open ended concept befitting the large category we speak of when we speak of a work of art. Abstraction fails as a pure and open-ended concept or in other words as something that cannot be exactly defined, as feelings cannot be exactly defined, when it becomes a thing on the wall to be dusted. Abstraction was meant to be an idea without concept, a feeling without words, image without association, an indescribable force, a law of nature, nature itself. But since hardly anything represents a closed concept more than a square, representation is unavoidable. We would have to transcend the physical to the metaphysical to have freedom from association.
Originally, Abstraction was to be idea without concept. Kind regards, Rebecca
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Art is an indefinable concept. A hectic assemblage of objects and nonsensical smearing of paint get a title and a price tag. Aesthetics plays little role. The devolution of art, demonstrates how art can be. In striving to be different and fresh on the scene, the Avant-garde marched art to the guillotine. The body is in one place, the head in another. What good is a concept when the idea is lost? The high degree of inclusivity leads to the compulsive gathering of ideas we place into an art basket woven with holes. Our collective understanding of art is gone. No one makes anything new because everyone does.
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The Night of the Night Bow
The night of the night bow, I rode with Paul after he lectured in Boston back to our house in North Blenheim. It is a four hour trip and it was winter. Paul's lectures are spellbinding. Through Paul's lips, art becomes a category of thinking, a fundamental method of thought attached to our very being, a twin of our emotions. This night he showed to a couple dozen ladies, one image and one image only and that was the painting of a night bow by Friedrich. My eyes watered with the uninterrupted glare of the projector but he was completely convincing that the night bow itself was an invention more useful for its breakaway abstraction than for itself as subject matter. I believe he didn't believe it was ever real and I had never seen one. Off the thruway midway home begins the gentle rise of the Catskill Mountains transforming gradually to our house on a hillside meadow peaceful as a chapel. Miles around no company but stars bright and black as eternity. I saw it from the car window when we arrived like an after image of the painting burned into my retina. Then, before entering the house, before turning on lamps, we walked out and witnessed together over the open landscape glowing with snow and the full moon, the transcendence of art into ethereal light for there all aglow was a night bow end to end as though it had been painted. Sincerely, Rebecca
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2020:
As days have become frayed about the edges, reminiscing is a sweet preoccupation with more distinction than waiting for things to get better. If the little "if" didn't exist, I would be teaching painting in Europe by now. What relevance is there in art? Once there was no such question. If it wasn't art, it wasn't relevant. A female painter said to me there is no place for women in art. Eva, Rome was built from the rubble of the dark ages. Even with the debridement of patriarchal wounds, women have a hard time liking themselves even once the scab is gone. I made my first paintings as a child living in Japan. I studied Art History in New York City. I began painting because no one cared for my singing. Now I paint because I am a feminist.
Unstructured time glides past with astonishing velocity. Time is senseless. There are no coordinates to measure the troubling abeyance. Cedar brush scratched from anemic stone choke the hills from where I am writing. Everything is sharp or offensive or morose, a troubled paradise armed and ready for the offensive. The oak trees are slowly dying of a virus caught from an insect. Cactus thorns, holly spikes, small branches festooned with lances pierce the foot when cut down in the grey forest of Texas. Funny, you mention yellow. I thought of writing to you of the cactus flower that glows with the hue of sunlight and lulls me into believing there is something yet to extract from the Universe. At least a flower imparts the feeling eternity is to be mild. Will I ever see you again?
I found myself in a dream surrounded by mask-less people, waking up with heart racing in panic. The horror drags on with no end in sight. It's good to hear from you and to know that all is as well as it possibly can be in this menacing juncture. If it weren't for you wafting in and out of thought, days would pass useless and empty, my emotions exhausted. Never could I see you and stay six feet away. Yours is a countenance for a thousand years. Being closer is the reason for writing.
Today the blowing wind sounds like people crying. You said it makes no sense to feel sad, but I'm in a dark spot birds fall into. Hiding behind my closed studio door, it's noticeable how even silence fills up quickly with the transmutation of energy. It's been a while that I've conceived of painting. There is nothing a brush and color can't make better.
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For the catalog of Agnes Schwägerl:
Seldom does Agnes imitate that most immediate to sight. There are few, if any details. There is never a strong source of light, almost never a shadow. Color spectrum is reduced to largely monochromatic application startled here and there by occasional splinters of complimentary hue. Open areas expressive of spatial depth are left nearly blank. Elements are distilled to utter simplicity. Space defined by marching trees, locks into step with the concrete objectivity of color applied in layers, once dark and scabrous, once delicate and fleeting. Unexpected luminescence hovers near a limb as though striking the encrusted canvas caused a spark. Points of sun in somber skies focus our attention on the indefinite center of an absorbent background. The space is the exponent of silence. Intermediate planes physically attached to the surface in some, segregated by color in others span voids to objects rarely poised in perspective. We are alone and we are stripped as trees for coming winter. A single stroke glides from weight of the supporting trunk to fragile tips of furthermost branches of a tree every bit as resonant of life as a human figure. Like a leafless soul, nothing presents impediment to the subject. Expressive of form and its gestation, intuitively derived shudders and waves of the painted surfaces reveal something beyond vision beyond perception. The final appearance seems effortless. Rapid strokes establish position of rendered elements, knowledge of that essential to chosen elements establishes selection and a heart establishes the hand in them. The heart and the hand are inseparable. The paintings possess the ease of paintings that paint themselves. Technical proficiency, receptivity to fundamental features, reflectivity on motivation is a part of the process. Extension to limits of imagination and spatial depth are immeasurable, but the freedom is ours. The paintings are defined by adherence to parameters unearthed as Agnes responds to her bared truths. Even as we find transport in them away from our surrounding, out of the gallery space, out of our offices, our homes where they collect, out from pages of this catalog, we notice how strangely out of place the paintings seem to be. Viewing the paintings for the first time or privileged to have known the work some years, the aspect most felt is abiding of deeper contemplation. Did I not just cross this somber, lonely meadow? Did I not just salute this bereaved tree? Was I not just there or are these grieving compositions actually conversions of my own fragmentary dreams? Dear Agnes, your paintings are irreconcilable to location anywhere outside introspection.
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For the catalog of Brigitte Chaloupka:
Brigitte handles her pictorial elements casually, letting them fall where they may atop her painting panels. Falling makes a world of sense: we read the things she paints like symbols on cards, minimal clues to a fortune told in wispy lines made with a thin brush. There is a house cut out of newspaper and there is a tree, then there are two trees seeming to speak to one another, yet it is a narrative unexpected of landscape painting. Her pictorial elements hover between rock and cloud not fully committed to themselves. They are a stand-in, a token, remains of an event passed from sight. Why is it there? We apprehend what falls from Brigitte’s hands when it falls into place in self-reflection. She releases representation from the restraint of presupposed order, frees pictorial elements to participate in a scheme of imagination deciphering the particular grammar of conversing trees fallen from her hand as though her art were the art of divination.
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