Judith Barbour Osborne: "Synchronized with ... head and heart"

“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:

 and a detail:

All the marks Osborne makes seem interconnected, indivisible from one another. As we stand before them, we see that there is no looking at one mark, or one place in the painting. The eye moves over the whole surface, the whole “landscape.”  She has made a whole world, here.

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.

I transferred the piece of painting from yesterday to a digital format (Brushes, which I know about because of David Hockney -- his exhibition of iPad drawings was shown in Paris), and I played with it last night and this morning. Then I was ready to work on keeping my promise... the paper went through the press twice, and I added a bit of collage to it.  Here it is:

I am happy... and I think the print is, too. Now I just need to fix the original painting! (Over the next several days ... tonight it's corned beef hash for dinner, in honor of St. Patrick's Day tomorrow).

It was a dark and stormy night....

Well, it isn't really dark yet, but it is raining, the squirrels are not cavorting* on the roof,  the tops of the redwoods are leaning gently back and forth, and the sky is bright gray. The view is really pretty, with the light reflecting back inside:

The weather has changed several times today, from windy to just a bit cool, to sunny, and finally to this uniformly-colored (but still oddly well-lit) sky. Our Buddha (who bears some resemblance to Gertrude Stein) has been watching over all these changes with the usual calm demeanor:

I am using the quiet time in the rain to look at a copy of a monotype that has been sitting in our living room for some time now, an experiment with acrylic paints run through the press. (The paints worked better after a few tries, once I understood the right amount of glaze to add to slow the drying time...  acrylic dries much faster than oils, and it needs help to allow it to remain damp enough to print properly).  The print itself is quite realistic, for me, and shows a glass vase, the stems of the flowers underneath the water, and delicate pink roses against green leaves above the rim of the vase.  I had copied the forms from a lush and nearly perfect painting by Edouard Manet, "Moss Roses in a Vase."  I grew curious about this late still-life -- there aren't many still-life works by this artist.  Manet is more famous for his large-scale figure studies and commentaries on the nude and riffs on the narrative painting: "Olympia," or "Luncheon on the Grass," or "The Bar at the Folies-Bergere" -- this last painting was finished in the same year as the flowers, 1882, one year before he died, in 1883, at the age of 51.  I think the very pale, tame roses were a deliberate choice; a still-life of fruits or cut flowers will deteriorate as it is painted,  and if the artist needs a perfect model, the objects will be replaced, or, if the artist is painting the changes, when to stop? How quickly can someone paint before the "changes" change again? These roses are still live, still softly glowing, yet the petals are just on the edge of being tipped with brown. He knew.

Where it is possible to photograph roses, perfectly-painted flowers -- in any stage -- are no longer easy subjects for painters. Walking through galleries, we do see ironic paintings of flowers, or perhaps flowers in the background of something more important, or, if we are lucky, we might wander into David Hockney's iPad paintings of flowers in vases, exhibited in Paris. What to do with these roses?

I am still working on that....

*in the meantime, one added note: perhaps "cavorting" seems excessive to describe squirrel movements... but that's how it sounds, to us, living under a peaked roof.  Language is worth playing with, despite the comment I heard from a character in the first season of Bones. The FBI agent Booth says, in response to an observation by his female companion, Bones, the forensic anthropologist (who often says things that are "too" truthful or too likely to send listeners to a dictionary): he looks at her and says "You have to quit using the words 'segue' and 'eschew,' alright? They sound French." (They're not, but it was a very funny moment).

Napa, crossing York Creek

The rain seemed to bring out the patterns of the vines. The branches were all trimmed to the same height, the rows were impossibly even, wires and posts ensured that nothing would escape. The grass in some vineyards was trimmed or pulled; in others, grass and yellow mustard blossoms took our attention away from the gray skies and the bare branches. No leaves yet. Mists rose partway up the mountains, peaks still visible, nearly a Japanese print. It was really really pretty.

So, given that this world was so lush, I felt I had to take another run at my Benday dot monotype. I decided to try something I had heard that Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg had each done: re-visit a print and add layers ... not via the press, but by adding oil-stick or acrylic paint ... I have re-worked prints, but never so thoroughly ... so I sanded the interiors of each "dot" and then painted over the sanded circle, following the colors of the wet wine country and leaving the initial blue of the print alone.  The monotype has new life, I think:

The sky, the clouds, the mists, the grasses, the quiet vines, the mustard flowers are all there.

The day grows light... it's a new blog!

I am starting a new blog, to go with my new website: annknickerbocker.com. The old blog from 2010 will be available on the website as well. I got up early enough this morning to see the sky become blue, with streaks of pink. I did not see the sun! I am looking at this print, propped up on my couch, because it needs ... something ... and I am waiting for it to tell me what that might be. The title is "Plum Tree, Redwoods: the Coming Winter Storm" and I think it is the flashes of light that come before the storm, and a slightly darker mood that are missing... I will be working on that this morning.

Okay...  it is now the cocktail hour, and after running this monotype back through the press, I think that I have found the missing colors:

I will sleep on it, but I think we are good.