“A
really good picture looks as if it’s happened at once. It’s an immediate image
... one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and
heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute.”
Helen
Frankenthaler
“Really good” pictures tend not to happen “at once,” though,
as Frankenthaler knew better than anyone. Her “Madame Butterfly” woodcut, below, is composed of 102
colors, from 46 woodblocks, and measures 2 meters (6 ½ feet) wide (www.nga.gov.au/exhibition/Frankenthaler).
The print is far wider than one wrist motion, and took a bit longer to put
together than one minute. And yet, when we look:
... this woodcut doesn’t make us feel anything that isn’t in
this moment, right now. All we see is that Frankenthaler had a way of making
paint and inks float away from their supports, whether she poured or printed. And somehow you don’t want to solve the mystery of those
floating images. You fall in with them, as you would any compelling natural
landscape.
Her work is sometimes critiqued as “just too pretty,” a
damning phrase designed to undercut the work and its maker, yet artist Amy
Sillman says there’s no “just” about it:
Frankenthaler’s
taste and grace are tough, like ballerina grace: those women aren’t sugarplum
fairies but muscular athletes, with machinelike, disciplined bodies.
Frankenthaler is in an incredible athletic decision-making process while
working... It’s an experiment with the alchemic and extreme reliance on color
as material and as optics...
“House
of Frankenthaler,” printed in The heroine
Paint, p. 267
Sometimes, it takes another artist to see the underpinnings
of a work, along with the artist’s consciousness and experience that remain
(almost) invisible. When I see
work this strong, I want to know that some artist, somewhere, has seen the work
and is willing to try and take on its challenges.
Judith Barbour Osborne is a likely suspect. She has several shows on at the moment
in Connecticut galleries. I have
just come from her Exit Gallery show at the Essex Art Association (an
opportunity given as an award, the highest the gallery offers), and then I
visited more work in a show at the Guilford Art Center.
Osborne has worked with poets and musicians... She works with words as well as paints, choosing
to bring meaning into the light, to make “aspects of non-visual reality
visible, as if staining the wind” (JBO artist statement). Judith Barbour Osborne’s compact show in Essex, “Staining the
Wind,” is a master class in making an intimate space feel immense. She works in smaller spaces than Frankenthaler, yet she manages to create huge effects with her close studies. I think she has found the very next level after Frankenthaler, and pushed it to its very limits. Here is her “Revelation
# 4”:
It has a calming presence, for me, although Osborne says
that she generally hears people talk about the energy in her work. It may be that calm and energy come from
the same core place, in us, the place that relaxes by the sea or in the
mountain air. In the artwork before us we find words, too, embedded in the
paint and inks, just barely there, like a whisper or the strain of a song being
sung far away. Osborne says this is an integral part of her work: “My artwork is text-based
and utilizes elements of chance and intention. I abstractly write text with
tools ranging from small hand-made brushes to mops and brooms, from syringes to
batiking tools” (see the site
where she has worked together with a poet on an artist’s book: www.vampandtramp.com/finepress/o/judith-b-osborne.html).
Here is
“Revelation # 3,” also at the Essex Art Association:
“Revelation # 3,” also at the Essex Art Association:
and a detail:
Osborne is not only connected back to painters like
Frankenthaler, though. She is thinking forward, so she is also the director of a group of ten artists,
Gallery One (http://www.galleryonect.com)
and they are exhibiting work at the Mill Gallery of the Guilford Art Center
(through May 15, 2016). They
support and encourage one another, a gallery without walls. The works as a
whole make a very strong showing. Here is one of the pieces, Osborne’s “Revelations # 1”:
and a detail:
This is a painting created with transparent inks, brushstrokes, and
splattered marks, and it is luminous. It was a rainy and gray day outside, so we lingered indoors
as long as we could, staying with the art. The courage it takes to leave all
that “blank” space in an artwork... fierce. The words and the strokes from the artist’s hand somehow
turn us inward, crawl inside some empty space we must have been leaving there,
a space exactly as big as art.
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