(Conversation between Victoria Chapman and Los Angeles based artist, Shane Guffogg continues)
Women Artists Finding a Voice Through Color and Abstraction
VC: Are there any female artists from this period that inspired your work?
Shane Guffogg: The first artist to come to mind is Lee Krasner (1908 – 1984). She was doing some bold work but purposefully took a back seat to her husband, Jackson Pollock, to help guide and manage his career. I have walked into many museums and seen her work, not knowing it was hers, and done a triple take because of the energy of the gestural marks she was making. For instance, look at the painting titled, THE EYE IS THE FIRST CIRCLE from 1960. The brushstrokes evoke the clarity of an artist who has arrived at a place they can call their own. The dark lines are almost figurative, almost pointing towards a landscape, almost suggesting something organic, but it is instead an extension of her mind and body fusing into a moment of truth that transcends the identifying labels.
Another one of my all-time favorites is Joan Mitchell (1925-1992). I was fortunate enough to have seen her retrospective in NY in the early 2000s — and what a show! It started with her early abstract paintings from the ‘50s, with paintings like Hemlock from 1956. The sparseness of her brushstrokes depicted the presence of something, rather than the thing itself, and it was just pure magic. The brush strokes were a calligraphy that was all her own. The show continued on to works like My Landscape II from 1967 that again, taught and guided the viewer to a new way of seeing what is all around us. She took what Van Gogh had done and pushed it to the point of breaking, creating a new language; a new way of thinking and feeling. Her late works, which were on huge, multi-panel canvases like Edrita Fried from 1981, were just all-consuming, with fields of brushstrokes that spoke of the purity of color, thought, and the purpose of existence. The works were physical, and standing in front of them I could feel her presence, as my eyes traveled across their canvases, following their brushstrokes. I remember being very inspired by that show; it was almost as if she had erased all the rules that came before her, that every artist has to grapple with in one way or another. She did it!
Lee Krasner in her studio
Lee Krasner, The Eye is the First Circle, 1960
oil on canvas, 93 3/4 x 191 7/8 in.
Joan Mitchell, abstract painter and printmaker
Joan Mitchell, My Landscape II, 1967
Oil on canvas, 103 x 71 1/2 in.
Joan Mitchell, Edrita Fried, 1981
Oil on canvas, 116 1/4 x 299 5/8 in.
Shane Guffogg: Helen Frankenthaler is another for sure. The way she poured paints and pooled up colors on raw canvases completely flattened out the illusionary pictorial window. As I recall, she was dating the art critic, Clement Greenberg, who had been the biggest champion of Pollock and his drip paintings. Greenberg then took Pollock’s ideas to the next level: in order for painting to completely cut ties with its past, the image needed to be as flat as possible. Pollock’s drips crossed over each other, creating a conceptual space. Frankenthaler took it further and made the painting both subject and object. What her technique did was give her the license to paint with pure, saturated colors. Like Joan Mitchell’s work, she was informed by the landscape and her emotions, but the paintings were not about anything. It is a very Zen idea. Speaking of which, there are 3 ways to study Zen: the first is archery, the second is flower arrangement, and the third is painting!
VC: Hans Hoffman (1880 – 1966), who was Lee Krasner’s professor, said of her work, “This is so good, you would not know it was done by a woman.” These women exhibited their works alongside men, despite gender inequalities, and added emotion into the artistic landscape. Their ongoing experimentation with materials and media was a reflection of how they translated their world. Mark Rothko (1903-1970) once asserted, “There is no such thing as good painting about nothing… The subject is crucial, and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless” (A Letter from Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb to the Art Editor of the New York Times, 1943). I feel that the work of Agnes Martin (1912 – 2004) achieved said tragic and timeless subject matter. She believed “Beauty is in your mind,” and set forth, calling on spiritual inspiration. Her paintings seemed to be about states of existence, emotion, and the sublime. She wanted to create abstraction without cause, but with meaning. She learned to stop thinking. Gerhardt Richter (1932 – present) also said, “To talk about paintings is not only difficult but perhaps pointless too.” Richter later turned to Western clichés, calling on Capitalism and Realism. In the documentary, Gerhardt Richter Painting, he was noted as saying, “You can only express in words, what words are capable of expressing. What language can communicate, painting has nothing to do with that, that includes the typical question, ‘What are you thinking of?’ You can’t think of anything in painting, as it is another form of thinking.” He said that he was interested in things he did not understand. “It’s like that with every picture, I don’t like the ones I understand.” Being an abstract painter, what is your take on this?
Agnes Martin a painter who was always wanted to express emotional states in her work.
Agnes Martin, Untitled #2, 1992
Acrylic paint and graphite on canvas, 72 x 72 in.
Shane Guffogg: I have to take what Hans Hoffman said of Krasner as an unfortunate byproduct of his era. Too bad, because art is art, regardless of the identity of its creator. I have been a big fan of Agnes Martin’s work for many years. The reductive approach that she employs is, in my view, a spiritual practice in finding the truest essence of nature (which she was surrounded by in her New Mexico home-studio). The bleached-out colors of the rocks, the muted raw sienna grays of the sand, the faintest blue from the sun-weathered sky; rows of dots and dashes that echo the formations of nature, processed through her own sense of order. They all converge into a state of mind that serves as a conduit between the self and the natural world. She managed to create works that are so pure that they bypass any and all political rhetoric or religious associations. They are not for everyone, but for those that get what she was saying, they whisper like the echoes of a far-off thunder in the desert.
Gerhard Richter is an entirely different matter. I agree with his sentiment of understanding: if I know what I am painting and truly understand it, then it loses its inner power. When I am painting, if I recognize something familiar, I paint it out. I always want the work to stand on its own, outside of me or the political times we are living in. Richter was faced with the monumental task of carrying history’s weight on his palette… maybe I should say he tasked himself. I knew a former student of his and I remember talking to him about Richter. This was before he had his big retrospective at MOMA, before he was being touted as the greatest living painter. My friend was saying that Richter really wanted to paint like Rembrandt, and talked about the old masters often to him and his fellow students. He was after the magic that paint, in the hands of a master, can create: it can seemingly open a portal into another universe. I saw his retrospective at MOMA and I was enraptured with his massive body of work. Unlike Agnes Martin’s retrospective, which sounded like one or two keys being gently touched on a piano, at exact intervals; Richter’s was a quartet followed by a symphony playing Wagner, only to be silenced by his candle paintings; frozen moments of consciousness, glowing and abstract. He makes no attempt to hide his use of photography within his paintings; he sees it as part of his landscape. His abstract paintings, done with squeegees, are a totally different animal. I often joke, and have for many years, that all I am really doing is smearing paint. Well, that is quite literally what Richter is doing. That being said, he becomes an alchemist when he pushes and pulls the paint across large surfaces of canvas, allowing it to become more than a metaphor for our physical world, but a world within itself to gaze at and wonder about. These pure abstractions are without subject; pertaining only to the paint and the record of what the artist did with it. That recording, therefore, becomes the subject. Richter is forced into leaving himself, his thoughts, and his preconceived notions behind, and instead surrendering to the moment. His colors are often primary, with rich cadmium reds, yellows, and cobalt blues layered over each other and pulled apart, leaving behind spaces to stare back into; leading to the vulnerable moment of creation.
Gerhard Richter, A B, Meditation1984
Oil on canvas, 2 parts 125.9 x 157.4 in.
VC: Hilma af Klint (1862 – 1944) was a great example of an artist with a spiritual connection to the universe. I should have her brought up in Part 5. Her paintings debatably may have predated Kandinsky and Mondrian’s works, which would make her the first abstract artist. From my point of view, Klint’s paintings were about the silence of the mystical world. She founded a group with four other women called “The Five” that would host séances in search of spiritual guides. These “High Ones” were thought to bring about artistic messages for the humankind; Klint’s job was to transmit these messages into written notes, drawings, diagrams, programs, narratives, and eventually paintings. These paintings were about making the invisible visible, by using biomorphic shapes and lines that crossed and spiraled. Some of the colors were said to represent genders – blue was for female and yellow male. From 1906 – 1915, she made 193 paintings based on the messages she received from The Five’s séances. She was said to propose questions with no real answers. In 1907, she began a series of 10 paintings that explored the transition from birth to old age. It was only 20 years after her death that these mysterious and spiritual works would be unveiled for viewing. We did not know very much about her because during her lifetime she kept her work private. Her paintings were exhibited last year at The Guggenheim Museum in New York. The exhibition, titled, Paintings for the Future, was a big success. Without color, I don’t think Klint’s work would have translated the messages she received from the heavens. How do colors do this?
Hilma af Klint, The Swan No. 9, 1915
Shane Guffogg: Colors resonate with us because they are produced from the various frequencies at which light vibrates, and all matter is made up of vibrations. If you think about vibration, you understand, then, that colors are energy. Hence, if she was so tapped into another realm, its colors would have been the most logical way of translating its energy into a message that we can understand. The colors can affect us like music, as sound is another form of vibration. If you look back at Renaissance art, the colors used all had specific meanings and were assigned to different people in the paintings, in order to inform the viewer of the importance of the various people being portrayed. I have only seen Hilma af Klint’s works in books, but what I have seen takes the form of a pure throughline from the unconscious and the subconscious to the surface of perception; consciousness. In other words, the shapes and colors in her work are paradigmatic of the deepest parts of the human mind and collective memory that we are all bound to by an invisible thread.
Hilma af Klint in her studio
Hilma af Klint, Notebook July 2-11, 1919
VC: Her work was different from her peers, but they somehow feel akin to Richter’s candle paintings, which convey a universal meaning. His painting Cage 4 (stemming from a series of works that drew inspiration from the musical abstractions of John Cage) conveys its meaning differently as if the intent is trapped within the piece, scratching at the canvas from behind the surface. Richter’s works, however, always seem to be coming from the same place. He and Klint seem to have been working from similar ideas. Am I wrong?
Shane Guffogg: Klint was coming from a very pure, spiritual place, whereas Richter was saddled with the weight of art history. If you look at his early work, you can see the influences of the American Pop Art movement, followed by photo-realism, which depicts the surrounding world as recorded by a camera. In his mature work, he embraced abstraction, not wanting to be labelled as only a photo-realist. By contrast, Klint’s abstract works were pure, without the heavy constraints that art history can have on an artist. They were not made as a reactionary gesture; they were made instead to convey a spiritual meaning. The shapes and colors are unadulterated – she really created her own visual language, just like Joan Mitchell and Agnes Martin. What I am so happy about is how the public responded to Klint’s work at the Guggenheim. It was one of the most highly attended exhibitions ever and received so much great press! It showed me how the intention of her message is timeless, making it universal. That is not something that can be taught in art school nor conceptually figured out. Her intentions were genuine and uncontaminated by the art world’s rhetoric, which is why her works resonated with a new audience, even over 100 years after their creation.
Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future | The Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, New York
Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future | The Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, New York
Stay tuned for Part 2 of Color Essay 6
Victoria Chapman
Studio Manager
A very special thanks to Neville Guffogg for editing
Note: all images shown in this email are (fair use) public domain