IAS371: artist research

Looking at these two artists brought me full circle back to the original concept for my project exploring grief - that simplicity and avoiding of a story act as a doorway to stillness and transcendence. My experimental pieces haven't exactly reflected that impulse but it's been there just under the surface waiting for me to explore and get messy with different mediums.

It's like the work of Agnes Martin and Sol LeWitt are two different aspects of my project that have been battling out inside me. One is a desire to create beauty free from story and artifice and the other is about a pure idea and intellectual exploration.

Agnes Martin

I'm once again in love. For me, the simplicity and minimalism of her work speaks to the transcendent. The line, rhythm and repetition creates stillness in my mind. Quite the mystic, I enjoyed her essay "Beauty is the Mystery of Life" enormously and have included quotes from it below. Agnes Martin's tips on How to be an Artist made me laugh out loud multiple times. Her 6ft x 6ft canvases must be awesome to behold.

The climb [through Martin's work] becomes a sort of secular pilgrimage, on which you may feel your perceptual ability to register minute differences of tone and texture steadily refined, and your heart ambushed by rushes of emotion. (source)

Agnes Martin

On a Clear Day

1973

screen print

While deeply impressed by the Abstract Expressionists, she did not follow in their stylistic or aesthetic precepts, but began to paint in a reductionist mode, producing paintings that recalled early Mark Rothko in their simplified geometric frontal forms.The subsequent years found Agnes Martin moving away from Rothko’s generally romantic overtones—his luminous, floating rectangles—toward a more precise and impersonal image. Her paintings became progressively more symmetrical—highly organized and delicately executed squares, rectangles, circles, all bathed in pale and muted colours. Her preoccupation with the detached and geometric culminated in an intense fixation on grids (source)

Agnes Martin

Fiesta

1985

Acrylic and graphite on canvas

183 x 183.2 cm

"It is not the role of the artist to worry about life - to feel responsible for creating a better world. This is a very serious distraction. All of your conditioning has been directed toward intellectual living. This is useless in art work. All human knowledge is useless in artwork. Concepts, relationships, categories, classifications, deductions are distractions of the mind that we wish to hold free for inspiration." - Agnes Martin

Agnes Martin
Untitled
2004

"Abstract or non-objective feelings are a very important part of our lives. Personal emotions are anti-art." - Agnes Martin

Agnes Martin

Happy Holiday

1999

acrylic paint and graphite on canvas

"Art work is responded to with happy emotions. Work about ideas is responded to with other ideas. There is so much written about art that it is mistaken for an intellectual pursuit." - Agnes Martin

Agnes Martin
Untitled #101975

Agnes Martin

Untitled

1977

watercolor and graphite on paper

So LeWitt

In contrast with Agnes Martin (they were friends in New York before she left for the desert in the late 1960s), So LeWitt was all about ideas and conceptual art. He reduced his mark making to basic shapes and limited colours and lines within self-defined rules he then felt free to bend. He also created instructions to follow, diagrams, plans and logical and illogical games and other intellectual experiments.

"His work — sculptures of white cubes, or drawings of geometric patterns, or splashes of paint like Rorschach patterns — tested a viewer’s psychological and visual flexibility. See a line. See that it can be straight, thin, broken, curved, soft, angled or thick. Enjoy the differences." (source)

Sol LeWitt

Lines in Four Directions, Superimposed (Horizontal)

1971
Etching

“When you work or before your work you have to empty your mind and concentrate on what you are doing. After you do something it is done and that’s that... After a while you can see some are better than others but also you can see what direction you are going.” - Sol LeWitt

Sol LeWitt

Yellow Grid, Red Circles, Blue Arcs from Four Corners, Black Arcs from Four Sides

1972

Colored ink and pencil on paper

"Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution." 
- Sol LeWitt

Sol LeWitt

Black With White Lines, Vertical, Not Touching

1970

Lithograph

“When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art..." - Sol LeWitt

Sol LeWitt

Lines, Not Long, Not Heavy, Not Touching, Drawn at Random (circle) in Four Colors, Printed in Four Directions

1971
Lithograph