In recent years, my Christmas Day tradition has been to walk around Stanley Park and its waterfront. This year was different -- as we all know, in so many ways. When Christmas Eve offered a sunny break in the endless rain, I grabbed the opportunity instead for a walk around closer-to-home Trout Lake.
Among my reflections that day, I decided to pull together the results of a made-at-home workshop I've been doing and make a splash for New Year's Eve. The workshop idea came to me some weeks ago when I was looking through the gorgeous book that my artist friend Y gave me on the artist Nicolas de Staël. It's a very special book indeed -- published in 1981 by a distinguished arts publishing firm in her native Switzerland -- edited by her gifted mother, designed by her artist father.
I knew something of de Staël and liked some of what I'd seen -- quite different, in my view, from earlier abstract artists like Kandinsky who I had definitely NOT liked when I wrote a paper on him in 8th grade. Maybe this was my nudge to learn more about some of these vital art movements that marked the 20th century. So I decided to enroll in a self-designed Workshop on Abstraction to mark the end of 2020 and right up to January 6th, the traditional end of the holiday season in my family. Here we go, with reference at the outset to a capsule summary on Abstract Art courtesy of the UK's Tate Modern.
I started gathering supplies and tools -- realizing that my small experiments would not require buckets of paint or bulldozers.
Even though I knew I'd be working in small scale, I decided to play "Let's Pretend" -- and I invite you to join me. The only rule is that we must all pretend that each work occupies a good part of the wall of a museum, like Picasso's "Three Musicians" that I saw and photographed at MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York City in 2018.
As I poured my morning coffee before the first workshop, I looked out my back window and saw wonderful block-ish markings where the rain had stuck on the cement wall across the laneway. This was my impetus for the piece that I've called "First/Most" -- because I spent the most time on this and learned a whole lot.
At first, I planned to focus on a different element of design and composition in each work -- texture, for the second work, and in a very definite blob.
Then I let loose with my inner Jackson Pollock to produce "Squeeze, Spatter, Pour."
This called to mind a stuck-together pile of paint remnants I couldn't bear to throw out. It's normal for me to use the caps of little bouillon jars to hold my mixing sticks as I paint. Every once in a while, I scrape out the bits that have collected and end up with colourful discs. One of those cast-off discs was so pretty, I had to immortalize it on the lid of my jar of pushpins.
I glued some of the other cast-offs onto transparent plastic, and the finished piece is quite striking dangling from a hook in my studio with light behind it.
Just imagine it ten feet high, with the title "Cosmos," hanging in a window of the Whitney Museum of American Art. (from My Historic Trip of 2018 -- what's New Year's Eve for, if not nostalgia?)
Let's fast forward now. Here's "Bullet" -- maybe a little reminiscent of Malevich who I don't like any more than I like Kandinsky.
And how about "Black Reef" -- which initially reminded me of Adolph Gottlieb's "Blast", unforgettable from one of my first painting books.
Now to my favourites. If these measured, say, 10 x 10 feet or thereabouts, I'd actually enjoy seeing them on my living room wall. First, "Dream State."
"Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is."
But I can't claim the Best in Show, which evolved entirely by accident. Here's the dramatically gorgeous piece that revealed itself as I scraped down an old plywood palette -- layers upon layers of just-glimpsed old paint. I've called it "Excavation."
