#agnes martin

Donald Woodman | Agnes Martin and Me

I was making striped paintings for awhile in my 20s, but stopped after I found the work of Agnes Martin. I felt like she had already achieved what I was looking for, and I felt content with that.

Several years later I revisited stripes because they were the most accurate way to communicate my intentions at the time. These new intentions for the work created the layered process you can see above—and, consequently, an interesting aesthetic that felt unique enough to be worth exploring.

Later, I was finally able to see some of Agnes’ work in person. Despite their similarities from afar, our paintings are quite different up close. While the screenprints that reignited her art practice—On a Clear Day, 1973—are almost unbelievably perfect, her paintings later could be considered quite flawed—full of flecks of dried gesso, misaligned pencil marks, and other imperfections. But that was an integral part of her message. The work wasn’t perfect in the worldly sense, but was about the choice to create a perfect state of being regardless—while both creating or observing art, or anything else.

I see this as a form of great compassion, of enlightened being, and a very beautiful thing to express.

Pictured above is my painting, Alignment, from 2017. It has three violet stripes on a gold background, covered in many layers of translucent white paint, creating a soft and ethereal quality that is impossible to capture. It speaks to my experience of the same inner perfection Agnes Martin painted and spoke of. It is about the idea of creating and observing from this perfection rather than from a perspective informed by the physical world. This is why you are seeing the painting through a veil of white paint, rather than directly onto the brightly-coloured surface below.

michaelppp:

Agnes Martin

Galisteo, New Mexico, 1992

Mary Ellen Mark

https://www.maryellenmark.com/

dmacwilliam:

Agnes Martin, The Rose, 1964

istmos:

Agnes Martin, untitled, 1960