In this episode we will explore through the creative hands of three American women painters, Agnes Martin, Almas Woodsey-Thomas and Helen Frakenthaler what is recognizable in nature (trees, flowers, water) through Abstraction; “representations pared down to the minimum.”
Resources for this episode include writers Jerry Saltz, Stephen Little, New Britain Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, Wadsworth Atheneum, Artsy Magazine.
Script: Capturing Nature: Abstraction & the Female Voice
This talk will take you on a journey into nature—we will experience trees, flowers, bodies of water, formations of land, even the moon through the lens of female artists. Through the creative hand of women, we will see and experience what is recognizable in nature through Abstraction—“representations pared down to the minimum” We will predominantly explore works by three American Abstract female painters, from mid to late 20th century: Agnes Martin, Alma Woodsey Thomas and Helen Frankenthaler –and include female artists in the collection. They distill what we see in the natural world into the essence of its shapes and forms, colors. I propose we can experience the depth of beauty we see in nature in equal measure to compositions “untethered from those recognizable objects in nature.” But they also expose aspects of the inner lives of these women artists—as the painter Etel Adnan, said “I paint what I am.” My interest in nature expressed in painting is inspired by my walks and hikes in the woods. Almost daily you will find me amongst a cathedral of trees–the rustling leaves as the wind shifts through its branches. The way light filters through varying shades of green or in the Autumn’s swell of colors—even trees stripped bare in winter, the textures, patterns, shapes,— sear into my spirit. In my refuge amongst the high branches of trees, or the shimmering reflection of the sun atop a reservoir of water, or the surprise of a patch of flowers greeting me, in my isolation in my isolation with nature—I experience a sense of awe. I perpetually chase it, especially as I scale and hike towards mountain peaks.
Before I steer you into the visual expressions of nature by women, 20th century American female artists, Martin, Woodsey-Thomas, Frankenthaler, let’s explore nature, the drama, its beauty, its stillness through works in the collection here at New Britain Museum of American Art. And to anchor you, before we springboard into Abstraction, in works expressing nature in its naturalistic grandeur. 19th century artist Thomas Moran’s The Wilds of Lake Superior (1864) offers the viewer the drama in landscape. He would travel to a place, make sketches, then go back to his studio to paint his composition—his finished paintings were not meant to be “literal transcriptions of nature.” It does reveal his close investigation of nature.
What we see in this work are qualities of Sublimity (feeling of awe) and the rootedness in human emotion. He painted what he observed but also imbued it with what he felt. Ipswich Marshes (Martin Johnson Heade-1867) Depiction of East Coast marshes—I include this horizontal work to illustrate a sense of stillness, quiet, as the sunlight compresses against the horizon and illuminates the scene-wide swath of the landscape. A naturalistic depiction of simplicity, tranquility; a meticulous, tightly controlled composition, nearly invisible brushwork. Both Moran and Heade were part of the Hudson River School, a 19th century movement in American landscape and America’s first independent artistic tradition. They “created works that were intended not only to memorialize the grandeur of the American landscape but also serve as instruments for spiritual contemplation—they believed that nature could heal the human spirit.”
Many women also painted and created works of the American landscape in the 19th century, as both professionals and amateurs, though they were not as well known today as their male counterparts. Mary Nimmo Moran, Thomas Moran’s wife—etching of “Figure in the Woods” (1888); –we see the majesty of nature through an intimate lens. Moran’s “intimate scenes of people walking in the landscape are very pleasing. They recall journeys through the woods enjoyed by the artist and her female companions. Giant trees overwhelm and overshadow the traveler; figure is dwarfed by the trees.
Let’s transition our focus to consider not just a landscape of trees, land formations, water, but a singular tree, let’s take a closer look at Georgia O’Keeffe’s “The Lawrence Tree” (1929)—can be viewed at the Wadsworth Atheneum—O’Keeffe, in her creative expression, made the world her own by looking. She painted this tree at the writer D. H. Lawrence’s ranch during her first visit to New Mexico. There was a bench right underneath this giant pine tree—she stretches out on the bench and looks up and there she sees this pine tree swooping up, its branches reach out like tentacles. In bright blue she renders the night sky. It is “wonderfully abstract and disorienting, wrapped up in that wonderful universe. Historian Carol Troyen asserts, “And it has to do with how O’Keeffe thought about trees. Trees really are surrogates for people and she said at one point, “I wish people were all trees. And I think I could enjoy them.”
Agnes Martin (1912-2004): Trees—Martin offers me, the viewer, a place, a space to experience beauty in nature in “restrained yet evocative” canvases. To explore Martin’s The Tree (1964), is to understand her “unique style, transforming what she experiences in the natural world into minimalist works, hard edge abstractions” works like Tree, and she did others, portrayals of the night sky, etc in similar style, come from her belief that “spiritual inspiration rather than intellect create great work.” Tangibly what we see is “the tree translated into a gridded arrangement, processed through meticulous horizontal and vertical lines, washed over with white oil paint.” Martin merges two artistic styles, creating her unique artistic vocabulary and looking experience. Minimalism, a term that emerged in the 1960s-mid 70s. Goal is to “reduce painting and sculpture to its bare essentials-to the bare bone essentials of geometric abstraction. It eliminated representational imagery–what we see in the natural world in favor of the repetitive use of an element.
The other artistic style is Color Field painting as the name implies has two components, “color” and “field” It rejects the illusion of depth and gestural brushwork—instead artists apply color in swaths and often span the entire canvas. It eliminates any distinction between a subject and its background–the canvas is treated as a single plane. I love this description, “Luminous and brooding colors saturate the canvas with contemplative stillness.” “The Tree,” is described by Martin as her first grid, the origin for all that followed. She proclaimed, “When I first made the grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence. And so I painted it and then I was satisfied. I thought, this is my vision.” The Tree is composed of 24 horizontal bands of narrow, vertical penciled rectangles, drawn over washes of white oil paint; bands of empty rectangles alternate with those occupied by quartets of faintly tingling vertical lines. At the bottom, the canvas rests on a band of empty rectangles, the topmost band is filled. Vertical lines are slightly heavier than horizontal ones. ” Curator Lea Dickerman says, “You can’t take it all in quickly, we are drawn to focus on the subtle variations of her hand in the process of making this grid—that tension between the regularity of the grid and the handmade quality of the lines.” The irregularity of lines is only noticed upon close inspection.–it creates a subtle rhythm, “somewhat of a beat of respiration, an evocation, perhaps of the upward-flowing sap of a growing tree. Its roots in all of the grids
Let’s consider Martin’s practice, her ritual in creating these large scale compositions. I came across a short video produced by the Tate Museum of an interview with Martin. It was produced when Martin was a much older woman and established artist. Martin said, “Everyday I ask what am I going to do next? That is how I ask for the inspiration. I don’t have any ideas myself. I have a vacant mind in order to do exactly what the inspiration calls for.” Agnes Martin would sit in her rocking chair until the idea came into her head. This ritual, sitting with a vacant mind, was deeply influenced by her interest in Taoism and Zen Buddhism. From this practice of accessing inspiration, she would be presented with a fully formed image in her head. It appeared in her head at a very small scale like a postage stamp. In a notebook she draws out the postage stamp sized picture and then does complicated mathematics to scale it up to meet the self-defined limitations of her canvas–they are usually quite large. Martin described this process as “See, I have a little picture in my mind and I have to make it into a six-foot canvas.”
Image is transferred onto the canvas using tape, a ruler, a pencil—it is a very meticulous process. She would then mix liquid paint and apply it with quick gestures. Grid—Minimalist—Luminous Paint—Color Field. Martin said, “My paintings are about merging, about formlessness…she creates through the medium of paint the ways the tangible can transport our senses into other states of being….She refers to this state of being as “a world without objects, without interruption.” Alma Woodsey Thomas, black female painter has traveled the roads of experimentation in painting. Her early art was realistic, was representational, (“Grandfather’s House” 1952) and through a challenge by her Howard University Professor James V. Herring and her peer, the female artist Lois Maillou, Thomas experiments with abstraction, developing her own unique, signature style. Abstraction evolves in Thomas’ work when she is in her sixties and seventies, after she had retired from teaching. Thomas said, “through my impression of nature…I hoped to impart beauty, joy, love and peace.”
Thomas was inspired by the garden outside her window, watching the ever-changing patterns that light created on her trees and flower garden–she painted images, like “Spring Fantasy” 1963 that suggest light flickering through leaves and petals. She used dabs and strokes of paint to express color every time the flowers and plants moved in the wind. Her fluid acrylic colors helped her to dissect, elongate, enlarge patterns of flowers. This idea of expressing light in nature, specifically flowers was depicted and explored by the Impressionists—The Impressionists tried to get down on canvas an “impression” of how something appeared to them at a certain moment. —Let’s look at a couple from the collection: William Metcalf “Mountain Laurel”(1905) –lighter and looser brushstrokes, less concern with sculptural form, en plein air (painted outside) “On the Moor Gloucester” by Harriet Randall Lumis also adopts a more Impressionistic style, employing broken color and vigorous brushwork, Lumis conveys the impression of the effects of light—she abandons three dimensional perspective.
From this foundation, Thomas paints abstraction inspired by moments, by intimate, fleeting moments. Essentially Woodsey Thomas was an autobiographical artist who found her material in daily experiences. Color, emphasis of the primary colors of the spectrum—red, yellow and blue in combination with in between or intermediate colors-violet, indigo, green and orange, and the vivid presence of nature’s flowers in its infinite variety. Breeze Rustling Through Fall Flowers (1968) acrylic on canvas When you look at this—we see a “mosaic approach (Byzantine mosaic effect) to creating an abstraction of luminous color” Jewel-like colors–There is no illusion of depth, the surface is energetic –flat pictorial plane, shapes evoke a finely fractured piece of colored glass—crackled and interlocking fields of colored shapes on a white canvas. The field conveys a sense of infinity. Her paintings are grounded in the forms and colors of the natural world—focused purely on the natural world’s wonder and sublime quality. Thomas said, “Man’s highest inspirations come from nature. A world without color would seem dead. Color is life. Light is the mother of color. Light reveals to us the spirit and the living soul of the world through colors.”
Red Azaleas Jubilee (1976) acrylic on canvas—at the Wadsworth—forms seem to dance on the canvas—we hover over a sea or red shapes—it is like walking in a garden from above on a light filled day. Mosaic patches in concentric circles—methodically layered applied thickly—depends solely on color and form; no foreground, middle ground or background. Flowers are pressed into irregular patterns. Her improvisation of color and form is compared to the improvisations and rhythms of jazz—do you sense it? Helen Frankenthaler: (1928-2011) Water as a Portal From the art critic Jerry Saltz: 20th century American painter Helen Frankenthaler blurred the borders between geometry, order, chaos, the body, atmosphere and ground—she accomplished this by pouring thinned watered down and turpentine-laden mixes of color directly onto raw canvas. She named this method “soak stain.” Her structures and shapes were open, controlled by natural forces while also describing them. Her paint and canvas became one surface—it created a liquefied, translucent effect. Edges evaporated; accident was visible—pooling paint created varying viscosities of thickness and thinness—what we see once the paint dries are majestic bodies of water, oceans, rivers, land masses without depicting it or engaging any abstract sublime—we see through her artistic voice beauty.
Frankenthaler let go of structure to define the image, landscape and water meld. Though the two works I am presenting, they read as abstraction, and their titles direct us, the viewer to representational understanding of the picture.” Mountains and Seas from 1952—She expresses through color Cape Breton in Northern Nova Scotia, a place she visited, the landscape—she accomplishes this as I noted earlier in a non-traditional way of staining the canvas with color, she opened new possibilities beyond Abstract Expressionism (applying paint atop the canvas)—the paint becomes embedded within the weave of the canvas. Sea Picture with Black from 1959—Frankenthaler shared she painted this work in the summer of 1959 when she was in Falmouth—a seaside town on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. “She returned to Cape Cod nearly every summer over the next ten years—she was an avid swimmer and swam the ocean every day. We see in both Mountains and Seas and Sea Picture with Black Frankenthaler’s direct and deep and physical connection to the water—we see it as entranceway into her paintings. We see power of the surf, spraying white foam, rocks and coral.
I want to end our talk with Abstract landscape painter Etel Adnan-described as an Artisian of Beauty and Truth—she recently died, born in 1925, Adnan was a poet, writer and artist. Her paintings take the form of radiant, abstracted scenery. She only began to attract mainstream attention in recent decades when she was in her eighties. From the Guggenheim museum, currently a retrospective of her work is being exhibited “Lights New Measure” The title comes from a poem she composed. “Adnan created her paintings decisively and intuitively. Seated at her desk with her small canvases laid flat, she would apply pigments directly from the tube, using a palette knife to render compositions of radiant immediacy. Simple geometries recur throughout her work: a red square anchoring abstract forms, a bright circle for the sun, horizontal bands that suggest the sky over the ocean.” Here we see “Early Moonlight,” from 2000. She refers to her works as “inner landscapes.” There is the sense of the fleeting moment, but also the eternal.
The painting of Agnes Martin, tree, the flowers from the brush of Alma Woodsey Thomas, the soak stained canvases of water melding with the land from Helen Frankenthaler, I proposed, are not made to be analyzed–but responded to. They cut through the materiality of this world opening up a clear and spontaneous space for pure emotion to swell. The artist Ann Wilson, in an interview she did about Agnes Martin, said, “Nature is like a parting curtain, you go into it.” The artists presented draw a deep response from those who enter into their works, its simple joy and beauty and an engagement with the artist’s individual expression of nature as they experience it.