Stone Go inside a stone. That would be my way. Let somebody else become a dove Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth. I am happy to be a stone. From the outside the stone is a riddle: No one knows how to answer it. Yet within, it must be cool and quiet Even though a […]
Nature
Landscape and Contemporary Art: Joan Mitchell
Joan Mitchell’s work straddles the line between abstract expressionism and landscape more than almost anyone else. Her paintings, many of them quite large, create a sense of place of their own while referencing our collective sense of land and the space surrounding us. On a personal level, Mitchell–in spite of all the horrific stories of […]
Landscape and Contemporary Art: Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park
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 […]
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 […]
Ocularcentrism
Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula I’ve been back from Australia for two weeks, but my intoxication with Aboriginal art continues unabated. My night dreams and daytime ponderings are populated with images and senses that are not of this hemisphere. For years I have studied Aboriginal art though reproductions. As is the case with any artist whose work […]
Land and Art Down Under
Painting by Dorothy Napangardi Tree trunks, Alice Springs . . . Painting by Johnny Warangkula Todd River bed, Gum tree, Alice Springs . . . Painting by Kathleen Petyarre Simpson Desert, Northern Territory . . It needs to be remembered that Central and Western Desert art works, and the narratives in which they are embedded, […]
Ramanujan
Continuing on the topic of Denise Green’s Metonymy… One of the seminal influences on Green’s view of art is A. K. Ramanujan. In his essay, “Is there an Indian way of thinking?” Ramanujan discusses the differences that exist between European and Indian approaches to reality. Several of his comments suggest parallels between Indian and aboriginal […]
Red dirt
A dusting of paprika-colored sand permeates every surface of my backpack and clothes. Even the toothpaste tube has a gritty residue. I’d like to think these particles are on assignment, carrying out an esoteric mission that only the small entities in life can undertake. (According to the ancient hymn/myth, Inanna is rescued from the underworld […]