"… JoAnna Novak becomes obsessed with the enigmatic
abstract expressionist painter Agnes Martin. She is drawn to
the contradictions in Martin’s life as well as her art—the soft
and exacting brushstrokes she employs for grid-like compositions
that are both rigid and dreamy."
See as well Agnes Martin in this journal.
A note at the end of an article on architecture historian
Christopher Gray in the current online New Yorker —
This article appears in other versions
of the April 10, 2017, issue, with
the headline “Dem Bones.”
"Defeated, you will rise to your feet as is said of Dry Bones .
These bones will rise again." — Agnes Martin, 1973
Accounting for Taste —
Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty at the Oscars:
Ben Affleck, star of "The Accountant," at the Oscars:
See also Prisoner + Bones in this journal.
"I think you should be more explicit here in step two."
— Caption to a cartoon by Sidney Harris,
American Scientist , November-December 1977
"If any perfection is indicated in the work
it is recognized by the artist as truly miraculous
so he feels that he can take no credit for its
sudden appearance."
— Agnes Martin, 1973, "On the Perfection Underlying Life"
One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
— Wallace Stevens,
"The American Sublime"
The Times Online on the artist Agnes Martin,
who died Dec. 16 in Taos, New Mexico:
"At a glance, or from a distance, her work looks like nothing at all. Square canvases are so palely touched with colour they might almost be blank. Considered slowly and carefully and close-up, however, the whole surface comes alive."
"The restraint and formal regularity of Martin’s work has led her often to be grouped with the Minimalists. She shares something of their self-effacing rigour and their concern with the material qualities of art, but she herself preferred to be seen in the context of the Abstract Expressionist painters who were her own contemporaries and early artistic models. Like them she may have seen abstract art as the means to a distinctively American sublime…."
"Taos had been a magnet for artists since the last years of the 19th century. D. H. Lawrence famously spent time there in the 1920s. 'Never shall I forget the Christmas dances at Taos,' he wrote, 'twilight, snow, the darkness coming over the great wintry mountains and the lonely pueblo.'"
From today's New York Times:
Agnes Martin, Abstract Painter, Dies at 92
Background: entry of 7 PM Wednesday.
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