All Individuals

There are twelve people in the Mondrian group and every one of these artist/students has a different approach.  We admire each other’s work, but do our own thing. This is enormously satisfying to me.

Here’s Keven Wilder’s first painting of this fall term, oil on canvas, 36” x 36.” The under-painting is red.  The red lines were scraped in while the greens were still wet.  Making a statement by a process of subtraction is exhilarating.  You don’t see this in the reproduction or at a distance.  You have to move in close and then the red lines strike like a revelation, which, in fact, they are.

I invite you to see this saying-something-by-not-saying as a key to entering abstraction.

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2016/07/24/treesnot/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2015/04/02/confetti/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/exhibit-at-ethical-humanist-society/

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.

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The Process

My painting class is full of surprises.

This painting started as a collage, or rather as a little window (about 2” x 1”)  chosen from a large 11”x17”  collage.  The painting, done in acrylic on two canvases joined in the middle for a total of 48” x 24”, takes its composition and color drama from the collage.  In the first layer, the red was red, but then it became black and then red again, but this time with the black under-painting showing through. (Click to enlarge.)
The decisive turn of events in the painting process was the drip.  There was, of course, no drip in the collage. But the painting seemed to need a linear element.  The artist, Arlene Tarpey, dislikes hard edges in her work.  What to do? Let the linear element create itself!  The drip, therefore, was not a result of a messy painting style, à la Jackson Pollock, but was deliberately engineered right there in the middle of the canvas.

Or rather, canvases.  The horizontal divide between the two canvases now became disturbing because the drip refused to ignore the break and emphasized the gap by oozing into it.  What to do?  Fussing with the drip would un-drip it and thereby highlight the awkward spot even more.

Solution: take the thing apart and treat each panel as an independent painting.

This sort of thing happens only when you’re working in the abstract mode.  You’re not committed to representing an image and you’re not hemmed in by preconceived notions about what this thing is supposed to look like.  You are IN the process and responding to what happens brush-stroke by brush-stoke and, yes, drip by drip. You’re not even committed to the original size of your work.  You can just take it apart.

Surprise!

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.

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