I love when the minimalism of form and the minimal amount of paint collide to create a great sense of depth. Another work I created this past Fall had the same kind of mystery- something to do with beginning the painting with a bold color and the subsequent subtle addition of just an ooch of paint and absolutely no brush stroke. “Painterliness” or mark making is not the only way to inject the artist’s energy into a painting–and I don’t believe surface texture is what its all about even though many artists are enamored with encaustic and resin and what I lovingly call decoupage. I love the idea that I know there’s barely anything there — yet the painting takes you somewhere in your mind and memory.
This painting is 36 x 36 inches and is being reserved for a very special exhibit opening in March. I’ll tell you all more later, but just know that I’ve desired to have my work shown in this wonderful space for a long time.
Stimmung, Kandinsky’s term for a work’s atmospheric element or transcendent tendency. Deliberate silence, deliberate negation, is a major way of sustaining the elusive spiritual atmosphere of the abstract work by ruthlessly reducing the artistic (tasteful outer beauty) to an absolute minimum. Indeed silence attempts to eliminate beauty altogether. Paradoxically the absolutely silent becomes the radically beautiful, just as for Hegel absolutely abstract spirit becomes radically concrete being. The silence evokes an ecstatic sense of immediacy, an experience of radical beauty, breaking all the habits of mediation conventionally associated with perception. Concerning the Spiritual in Contemporary Art by Donald Kuspit.
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