Room 7 at the Tate Modern March 2008
This was the ahhhh moment when all of my influences were shown together. I sat on the bench and pivoted from right to left from Joan Mitchell’s Number 12, to Claude Monet’s late water lily to Mark Rothko’s Untitled 1951 citrus beauty.
My paintings tend to stray to dark and moody in these dark and moody days, so to combat this I’m bringing in these works to inspire the palette, composition and texture of my winter works. Looser, airier and less of a concrete/heavy suggestion of landscape yet inspired by the landscape. Something these three artists (although Rothko would deny suggestions of horizon) sought in their work. Sharon Butler just reviewed MOMA’s Abstract Expressionists New York exhibit and had this to say about it.. “Rather than offering didactic explanations for each aesthetic decision, artists may rediscover the value in enigmatic, emotionally-rooted work whose meaning is intuitively derived and not so easily explained.” Something else I’d like to keep in mind with these new paintings.
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