The Abstract Expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler said, “True artistic creation of any kind is a very lonely process, a totally selfish act, and a totally necessary one that can become a gift to others–when the painting finds its audience.”
The “lonely” artistic process as Frankenthaler describes, parallels with the “lonely” existence I often find myself facing within the blank pages in my writings, from blogs to a book I am composing about art patron Elizabeth Colt. My role as a creator is a bookended by my engagement as an audience participant. Engaging with a work of art is a collaborative between myself and the artist, that gift Frankenthaler refers to; the visual expression that enables me to see and experience the familiar in new ways.
To be candid, I connect most easily with works of art that evoke the ethereal; sweeping colors across a landscape of abstract forms or the figure composed in an angle that directly shifts my cultural assumptions about the body. Close looking at works of art have shaped a passion that I share with my students through the story of art in the classroom and sear in my most personal relationships, especially with my children, to see outside the periphery of what constrains us.
Image Credit: NBMAA https://www.nbmaa.org/
This week I am preparing a new podcast episode and am challenging myself to explore the Abstract painter and Russian immigrant Esphyr Slobodkina. She is known for her delightful children’s book, “Caps for Sale,” a favorite on my children’s list of tales. I describe my research and preparations “challenging” because of her form of Abstraction. Unlike the expressive abstractions by artists like Frankenthaler who pours, pushes, and pulls color atop the canvas with brushes, Slobodkina stabilizes colors in geometric shapes.
Slobodkina places shapes and other linear forms with careful precision throughout the canvas. The hard-edged forms seem to float in her compositions of neutral backgrounds. There is something to be said for artists Frankenthaler or Pollock or Franz Kline who use their whole bodies as they move in and out of the canvas with their colors, evoking the sublime. I picture Slobodkina in a quiet space creating her patterns of repetition, sketching out an arrangement, and testing it out to see if it works.
Stretching myself as an audience member, looking outside what intuitively appeals to me and finding my way to where the artist’s “lonely” process meets the finished creation; it beckons my curiosity what “gifts” will arise for me. Stay tuned: Podcast Episode #62: Esphyr Slobodkina will be available on Sunday, September 15.