4:49 pm UPDATE: here are the 2 new stretched canvases. more on dimensions and what the images will be tomorrow.
"i had more legitimate schooling in holland but the things i was supposed to know he knew much better. he had an uncanny instinct for all art." willem de kooning quoted in carlen mooradian, "interview with willem de kooning in "a special issue on archile gorky, ararat 12 (fall 1971) p.9
today i will be posting thoughts and observations periodically throughout the day about archile gorky, seen above, born vosdanig adoian,pronounced vosDANig adoYAN (ca.1902-1948) and stretching two canvases for my next parade paintings. i may experiment with working on the two in tandem, so as not to get too stuck on one or the other, and see if i can translate and expand any discoveries made in one to the other.
more once i get to the studio and dive in.
12:30PM update: above right: gorky with his mother in korkom, armenia. she died of starvation in 1919, during the armenian genocide, when gorky was 17, a memory that haunted him for the remainder of his life.
once in the states, he made many drawings of her, and two iconic paintings based upon the above photograph. the simplified shapes in this painting (the painting of gorky and his mother is below, on the 1st row RIGHT) are an early manifestation of his later biomorphic abstractions .
i'm going back to stretching canvas and will continue later....
row 1:LEFT: one of gorkys' many drawings of his mother. RIGHT: one of gorky's two portraits of himself & his mother row 2 LEFT: a detail of parade 34. RIGHT: a detail of a gorky abstraction. in my post, during the time i was working on parade 34, (3/14-19): scroll down to my posts for those dates to read what i said) i shared that gorky had unexpectedly come to me as i was painting, and you can see what i meant. there are times, when we study the work of other artists by looking deeply at their work, that we unconsciously absorb something that speaks to us, which then pops out at a later date.
lyrical or soft, warm colors are not the first words that comes to mind when speaking of deKooning or Picasso. perhaps those are the qualities in gorky's abstractions i most relate to.' my love for the rocks i paint at north crestone creek is part of it.
this is a continuation of yesterday's blog post, composed today, 4/15:
below is an illustration of the point i made above. 1st ROW LEFT: painted in 2000; 1st ROW RIGHT: painted 2013; 2nd ROW LEFT 2013 collage; 2nd ROW RIGHT: 2014 collage. click on and scroll over each image for details.
the clearest relationship to gorky's biomorphic abstractions is in the detail of a 2014 collage, row 2, right. the genesis and development of my love for biomorphic shapes and soft earth colors can be traced back to the detail of a 2000 painting on the 1st row, left, and to earlier work. at some point, i'll put together a piece tracing these tendencies all the way back to my childhood.
