Ryan Barfield
10/23/17
Painting 1
Molly Zimmer
Agnes Martin was a Canadian born abstract painter. Her painting style spawned out of her experimentation with abstraction which led her to the minimalist style she is known for today. Her paintings are large, usually 5-6 feet on each side, and comprised of 1-3 pale, luminous colors outlined in grid pattern. The grid is drawn with graphite pencil and often times fades away near the borders of the canvas making the lines both indistinguishable from far away and to seemingly float in space. The light pastel-like colors engulf the lines from far away creating a richness to the paintings. The softness of her colors is accentuated by the opaque white gesso that is the starting point to all her paintings and never gets completely covered up. Neither do the pencil marks that create a unified, repetitive structure the closer you get. The longer you look at the lines the more your eyes start to contort and change the painting. All of these elements add up to a painting that’s meant to evoke feeling internally in a personal way.
"My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind"
-Agnes Martin
I Love the Whole World
1524 x 1524 mm. Acrylic paint and graphite on canvas
1999
With My Back to the World
152.5 x 152.5 cm. Synthetic polymer plate on canvas
1997
Wood
27.7 x 27.7 cm. ink on paper
1964
Untitled #5
1829 x 1829 mm. Acrylic paint and graphite on canvas
1991
Untitled # 7
Acrylic paint and graphite on canvas.
1977
Works Cited
Martin, Agnes. (2012). Agnes Martin: paintings, drawings, rememberances. London Phaidon Press.
Martin, Agnes. "Agnes Martin at Tate Modern" 2015. www.https://www.artsy.net/show/tate-agnes-martin
I deeply enjoy the use of line, and find it both calming and unsettling. I feel like the titles really help with the feelings in the pieces.
ReplyDeleteI have such a hard time with abstract pieces because I am never sure what I'm supposed to feel, but I appreciate this artist's titles to give me a place to start so I can explore the emotions of the paintings.
ReplyDeleteI really appreciate all forms of abstract art, mainly because that's a style I'm trying to get into myself because I'm not suited for realism in the slightest. But I like her pieces because the first two titles are very descriptive but when you look at the painting there is no possible way that you can come up with an image that the title would give meaning to. In this style of art the artist has their own reason for painting what they did, but we as the viewer can interpret the piece in as many different ways as we can possibly come up with, with no interpretation being wrong.
ReplyDeleteDo you know Agnes Martin is New Mexican artist-- she lived around Santa Fe.
ReplyDeleteCan you see how the New Mexican landscape could have influenced her paintings? What about the stratification of soil layers on all the mesas and wide skies we have here with horizontal bands of clouds?
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