Diebenkorn has been a flagship artist for me. I saw the first showing of his Ocean Park series while I was still in college, and seeing those luminous paintings was a turning point in my aesthetic education. I have never lost interest in this work, and every time I find one hanging in a museum–they […]
Land/earth
Landscape and Contemporary Art: Brice Marden
In a conversation with Brice Marden, Denise Green asks if he responds to one kind of landscape more than another: I’ve been more drawn toward the trees than the landscape space. I’m more interested in picking up the energy, rather than the details of the landscape. I want to transmit that kind of energy that […]
Landscape and Contemporary Art: Agnes Martin
My work is non-objective like that of the Abstract Expressionists. But I want people, when they look at my painting, to have the same feelings they experience when they look at landscape, so I never protest when they say my work is like landscape. But it’s really about the feeling of beauty and freedom that […]
Reading the Land
Kathleen Petyarre is one of the better known Aboriginal painters, and deservedly so. Her works are both complex and yet sublimely minimalist, suggesting both the macro and the micro view of the land around her. Many of her paintings pay homage to her dreaming ancestor Arnkerrth, the thorny or mountain devil lizard. Kathleen’s paintings, like […]
Explorations in Landscape and Art
As I continue to explore how Aboriginal art expresses a deep and complex relationship to the land, I am also interested in how the art/land relationship shows up in our Western cultural tradition. Ross Bleckner, typically described as an American abstract painter, takes a lot of his imagery from his experience with nature. From an […]