I was reviewing some writings of Robert Motherwell 1
the other day and stumbled across a thought of his that hit me
like a stun gun. And it's been sitting in my mind like a mental
hang-nail which I keep fiddling with over and over.
"I seldom allow horizons, because
of their illusionism. To preserve the integrity of the picture
plane, I have to convert
the horizon to a stripe."
And in this preservation of the picture plane, he speaks about
how it can become fractured by three-dimensional space. And of
course, the horizon line does this in a most powerful way.
So I have to ask myself...have I developed a crutch?
A few years ago I was impressed with the idea of
a prime meridian. I was reading Longitude by Dava Sobel
and next thing you know I was interested in time zones and how
we
measure
time
in relation to the prime
meridian.
I saw an analogy between the imaginary prime meridian and the
initial mark of a two-dimensional work. Does not everything fall
into relation to that first mark?
So began a new process where I was intensely aware of that initial
mark and how the work proceeded from it. Developed around it
and with it given its character, its speed, its incisiveness,
whatever.
But now...now...this all is called into question.
If emotion and thought are what I seek to describe, are those
to be presented
without any reference to the natural world of objects around
us? Does a relationship to natural forms mar the integrity of
those thoughts and emotions? Can they be removed from such trappings
of physicality without losing
their
relational
meaning? |
