Work in progress


Adams-SAM_0002-

Just a quick one today – working on this painting and feeling pretty good about the progress. I started this one over a year ago, and it has mostly just sat languishing in the studio. Every now and then I’ve dibbled and dabbled on it here and there, but I was feeling lost about the direction and totally not inspired.

But I recently had some sales (thanks Point Gallery!), which is great. And there’s nothing like having them ask me “are you working on anything big right now?” for a possible corporate client to light a fire under me. This one is 3 separate 36×60 panels, for a total of 108 x 60 inches. This is the biggest painting I’ve ever done, and I definitely don’t have the space or the strength to handle anything of that size except in pieces like this.

It’s also much looser than anything I’ve done recently, which was a challenge for me, yet spiritually freeing and very fun. I have a little bit more refining to do here and there, but I think it’s mostly done and won’t change a whole lot now.

Here’s what it looked like a year ago. One of the things that was stopping me was that I loved that large white shape two-thirds of the way across, and I couldn’t figure out how to move on without destroying it. But you see it is gone now, sacrificed in the name of progress.

Adams-IMAG2699-

September 23rd, 2015|Work in progress|Comments Off on Work in progress

2015 SAQA Benefit Auction starts today!

Adams-_MG_5254-
freedom from the usual authority

12 x 12 inches, ©2015 Deidre Adams. Stitched textile, found papers, acrylic paint.
Hand and machine stitched, hand painted. Mounted on stretched canvas.

The Benefit Auction is the most important annual fundraising event for Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA).  Your purchases help increase the recognition for art quilts and the artists who make them while supporting SAQA’s exhibitions, publications, and education outreach.

View the Quilts

The Auction is run in three sections for 6 days each, with a special section accompanying the International Quilt Festival in Houston.
HOW THE AUCTION WORKS

DIAMOND DAY: ALL Benefit Auction quilts will be available for $1,000 each on September 18 as part of a Diamond Day promotion. This early bidding window will remain in effect until September 21 at 1:30pm EDT.

Each week after Diamond Day, a different set of Auction quilts is available for bidding. The bid price is reduced each day (at 2pm EDT) as follows:

Screen Shot 2015-09-18 at 7.58.49 AM

For more information and to bid, go to the SAQA Benefit Auction site.

With more than 350 artworks to choose from, it’s an embarrassment of riches. You can be sure to find something to delight your senses. Here’s a very tiny selection of the artwork available:

firthOchre Stones 2, ©2015 Dianne Firth
KoolishString Theory, ©2015 Lynn Koolish
landauTrail Ride, ©2015 Jennifer Landau

September 18th, 2015|Art|Comments Off on 2015 SAQA Benefit Auction starts today!

Agnes Martin: No ordinary vision

Martin-Untitled5Agnes Martin, Untitled Number 5, 72 x 72 inches, 1975

Painting doesn’t exist and artists don’t exist. In the process of life, only the response exists. For example, sun shines on your hand and you say, “This is a caress,” now that’s real. Reality has infinite expressions. Each winter day is different from any winter day that ever existed and every painting that is real is different. The art world depends on obedience and surrender.
—Agnes Martin

 

Agnes Martin was a complicated person, singular in many ways. She suffered from schizophrenia, and during the 1960s she was hospitalized several times. In one instance “at Manhattan’s then-notorious Bellevue Hospital, she was subjected to more than 100 electroshock treatments.”

[1]

After living, painting, and teaching in various places including New York City, Martin gave up painting and moved to New Mexico for good in 1968. She began painting again in 1974. Although she was forbidden by her “voices” from owning land, she was able to make rental agreements with local landowners in New Mexico — first in Cuba, then later in Galisteo — which allowed her to build her own structures, including living quarters and studios. She had some help, but did much of the work herself, including making her own adobe bricks, digging a well, building a wind-powered generator, and building a 150-ft. windbreak from canvas, leather, and wood poles.

She did keep ducks and chickens at various times, but her “voices” did not allow her to have a garden because it was a distraction.

During her periods of sustained working, she did not allow herself external pleasures. She would limit her diet to bananas and coffee, or on one occasion, to bananas and Knox gelatin mixed into orange juice. At times, she slept in her unheated trailer even when the night temperature was below zero. She said, “I have absolutely no comfort now. But I don’t want it, all I want is a greater awareness of reality – joy and innocence.”

Hers was a solitary, reclusive life. She didn’t want friends, and she rejected offers of help and friendship. She told her dealer, Arne Glimcher, about the importance of eliminating distractions. “Emptiness is what I want – zero when I’m painting and then eight hours later with no interruptions hopefully you’ve done some good painting. In Cuba, they’re scared to death of me. I tell them if they knock on my door, I’ll chop their heads off.”

She was known to repaint a composition multiple times on fresh canvases until she was satisfied with it, deeming the others to have “mistakes” and finally destroying them with a box cutter.

Much has been said about the link between schizophrenia and creativity, and I don’t want to get into that here. But one cannot help being mindful of this when considering Martin’s own words. At times they sound truly profound and insightful, and at other times somewhat alarming. Perhaps there is no separation there, when you think about it. I’ll leave you with some of her thoughts on life and art, from a 1982 draft of her artist statement for Contemporary Artists (Macmillan 1983):

The enormous pitfall is devotion to oneself instead of to life. All works that are self devoted are absolutely ineffective. Even though they are often purchased by prideful people they are soon recognized as dead.

Devotion to life is a feeling. Art work is made with this feeling and response to art work is exactly the same feeling. This feeling of devotion literally carries us through life, past all distractions and pitfalls to a perfect awareness of life, to measureless happiness and perfection.

With no experience of real happiness, no conscious experience of devotion to life, one cannot be an artist. One must be lifted up, out of oneself, unconscious self, as in the contemplation of beauty.

The response to art work is unchanging even in thousands of years, proving that it is of life.

(Note: my reference for all of the above is Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances by Arne Glimcher.)

[1] Agnes Martin: In Two New Books, A Life Revealed by by Edward M. Gómez, July 4, 2015

August 23rd, 2015|Interesting Artists|Comments Off on Agnes Martin: No ordinary vision