During these first weeks of the New Year, I’ve been flat on my back. What started out as a year filled with promise, ambitious resolutions and over-achieving to-do lists, quickly devolved into two weeks of Influenza. You know, the kind where you’re too sick to read, watch TV or even sleep. You just lay there, staring out the window or locking onto objects in your immediate visual periphery.
In my state of torpor, I have been studying a
painting of mine that
hangs on the wall facing the bed that has sheltered me
while I recover. This painting is one
of the first I ever made using encaustic paints, a medium made of beeswax, damar
resin and rich pigments of color.
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| Linda Povey - Lemon Song encaustic on panel 6x6 inches 2012 |
As I reflected on it, I began to ask myself, where did this painting come from? What influences came into my brain, travelled through my consciousness and then somehow came out through my fingertips? As the great American designer, Charles Eames, once said, “To be realistic one must always admit the influence of those who have gone before.”
On the surface of it, I can say that this painting was
made from a place of exuberance.
I was ecstatic to discover the delicious, tactile sensuality of the encaustic paint. The smooth way it came off the brush and onto the substrate. Furthermore, I was delighted to be back on my beloved Cape Cod once
again, painting with my artistic partner in crime, Sharon Hayes. Having just turned 50, I felt confident
and optimistic about my life, and I think the painting
reflects the joy I felt in making it.
But as I reflected on the painting more deeply, I began to
consider other artistic influences. I have always been drawn to Mark Rothko, even as a child visiting the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Rothko, an Abstract Expressionist painter, believed in color as "merely an instrument" to get to the "basic human emotions." He was an early pioneer of the
Color Field school of painting, which is defined as painting "large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane." Something about these strongly emotional, unapologetic paintings has always captivated me.
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| Mark Rothko - Untitled Oil on canvas 8'8" x 11' 9" 1968 |
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| Visiting my favorite Rothko at MOMA, 2011 Untitled - Blue and Yellow 7'4" x 5'10" Oil on canvas 1969 |
Another influence in my artistic journey was the wonderful experience I had working with Stephen Haller at Stephen Haller Fine Art in the 1980’s, when it was still on West Broadway. Steve had a singular vision for his gallery; to cultivate and nurture artist's whose work was “emotional, gestural and dedicated to driving the image to its minimal essence.”
One of the gallery's shining stars, and represented by Stephen Haller for over thirty years, is Ronnie Landfield. A next-generation Color Field painter emerging in the 1960’s, Landfield sums up the essence of his work beautifully, “Spirituality and feeling are the basic
subjects of my work. They are depictions
of intuitive expressions using color as language, and the landscape (God’s
earth) as a metaphor for the arena of life.”
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| Ronnie Landfield - Rite of Spring acrylic on canvas 79 x 112 inches 1985 |
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| Ronnie Landfield - New Day Dawning acrylic on canvas 112 x 132 inches 2001 |
One of the most interesting elements in his work is
the linkage between Color Field and Chinese Landscape painting, with their distinctive, hard-edged borders. Ronnie once shared with
me that this provided a context, or a way to frame the complexity of
emotions within the borders. I
realized how many of my own works over the years
have incorporated the borders inspired by Ronnie Landfield and the Chinese
Landscape painters before him.
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| Linda Povey The Hi-Lo Mix is Very Now water color and mixed media on paper 5 x 7 inches 2007 |
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| Linda Povey Copper Pennies collage and mixed media on paper 4 x 6 inches 2012 |
I am grateful for Ronnie's inspiration and still proudly own a drawing he did for me in appreciation of my contribution to his successful solo show in 1987.
The artist whose work I am most inspired by currently is among the latest generation of Color Field painters, Joanne Mattera. A talented painter and journalist, she has written the seminal book, The Art of Encaustic Painting, as well as a highly engaging blog on the global art scene, JoanneMattera ArtBlog.
Mattera's Silk Road series alternates thin, vertical and horizontal layers of encaustic paint, creating a subtle grid, like a weave, or a piece of raw silk.
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| Joanne Mattera - Silk Road 146 encaustic on panel 16 x 16 inches 2010 |
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| Joanne Mattera - Silk Road 107 encaustic on panel 12 x 12 inches 2010 |
Beyond the technical achievement of these paintings, which is significant, is a luminosity which must be seen in person to be fully appreciated. Mattera describes her work as “lush minimalism,” using a grid pattern "the way classical poets used rigorous rhyme schemes to impose elegant order onto an otherwise messy outpouring of emotion.” Again, the structure of a grid, or a border, provides the necessary framework to express complex emotions.
It occurred to me that ultimately I had come full circle, right back to the initial joy I had experienced in painting Lemon Song. Rothko reflected in his final years that his interest was in "expressing human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.” Maybe it's just as simple as that.
I recently discovered that it was Stephen Haller who gave Joanne Mattera her very first solo exhibition back in 1995. I thought there was a nice symmetry to that. Again and again, the threads of our influence overlap and intertwine, artist to artist, generation to generation, producing an ever-evolving tapestry of what Jean-Michel Basquiat called, "someone's idea going through my new mind."
Love your influences, my dear! You are such an inspiration and I'm very happy to hear that you're back in the saddle, so to speak! XO
ReplyDeleteWonderful post Linda. I love Lemon Song. Very nice.
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