Blackpaint 498 – Ice Cream at Tate Modern, Breasts at the RA

Agnes Martin (Tate Modern)

Happy Holiday

This is the new exhibition at Tate Modern – those familiar with Martin’s work will know what to expect: the palest “ice cream” pastels (Neapolitan) , vanishing into near invisibility, stripes, huge grids done in faint graphite with tiny squares, a roomful of a dozen white canvases, occasionally, background fields varied by tiny, pale, differently coloured blobs… Her early work, influenced to a degree by other abstractionists, resembles Pasmore somewhat. Strangely, her later work appears, to a dissenter like me, to have more going on – a coloured stripe through the centre, a blue square, two black triangles with the tops snipped off. This seems the “wrong” way round, somehow. Still, if you emptied out your pictures early on, I suppose you start putting things in again, if you live long enough.

Like Rothko’s Seagram pictures, this is art that I think requires a contemplative attitude in the viewer that I am unable to sustain. I hope one day to be able to appreciate them more fully.

My Blake Calendar

Below is the picture for June. It shows Oberon, Titania and Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I find it enormously encouraging that even artists of William Blake’s taste and ability are capable of turning out crappy pictures occasionally.

National Portrait Gallery

I wrote about this beautiful little portrait of Hardy a few months ago.

Thomas Hardy, William Strang

A little while later, I bought a 70s Penguin paperback of EM Forster’s “The Longest Journey”; on the cover was this picture, also by Strang, called “Bank Holiday”.

I think it’s great – totally unlike the Hardy; for some reason, it makes me think of Norman Rockwell.

Forster and Woolf

While I’m on the subject of Forster and the above novel, I found it interesting that he, like Virginia Woolf (Lighthouse, Jacob’s Room, The Voyage Out), occasionally kills his characters off with quite brutal suddenness. He does in this, anyway; I wonder if there was any influence, and if so, in which direction?

Back to the NPG

Below are two more arresting paintings, both by John Collier. The first is, of course, Charles Darwin; the second, the Labour and later, Liberal, politician, John Burns. I suppose it’s partly the full square stance of both subjects and Burns’ hands on hips – defiance? frankness? I have to say that Darwin’s picture reminds me faintly of an orang utan – in a good way – but I think that may be because it was parodied in a cartoon and I “see” the parody…

Darwin, John Collier

John Burns, John Collier

RA Summer Exhibition

Proper review of this next week, but in the meantime, here is by far the best painting in the exhibition – the fact that Marion Jones is my partner has no bearing, obviously, on my opinion.

Bars and Triangles, Marion Jones

Diebenkorn, RA

I made my third visit to the brilliant Diebenkorn exhibition after the RA Summer Show – I started seeing great little paintings within paintings in the earlier abstracts, Albuquerque and Urbana series; little sections that would make paintings in themselves. I started to see slight parallels with some of Nicolas de Stael’s landscapes, especially “Sea Wall”. But most startlingly, I saw breasts everywhere. In “Albuquerque 57” (below) for instance, there is a very clear sketch of a pair of breasts that I hadn’t noticed before. After that, I saw them everywhere in these abstracts, mostly in the shape of the lobes.

Just above the green and yellow rectangular shapes.

To finish, here is a minimalist work of mine, in homage to Agnes Martin:

Close of a Long Day

Blackpaint

6.6.15

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