This has been a great semester in my painting class! I discovered so many artists through creating this journal. As I was looking through my next and last set of four artists, I realized that there are some big names I hear referenced a lot but that I am not actually familiar.
Jean-Michel Basquiat (American, 1960-1988) was a poet, musician, and graffiti prodigy in late-1970s New York, who honed his signature painting style of obsessive scribbling, symbols and diagrams, and mask-and-skull imagery by the time he was 20. “I don’t think about art while I work,” he once said. “I think about life.” I like his visceral and bold approach to layering and collage, his revelation that great art is simply a profound investigation of life.
Robert Rauschenberg rejected the angst and seriousness of the Abstract Expressionists, invented of techniques using unconventional art materials ranging from dirt and house paint to umbrellas and car tires. Pictured here are his first three-dimensional collage paintings—he called them Combines—in which he incorporated discarded materials and mundane objects to explore the intersection of art and life. His later artwork includes painting, fabric collage, sculptural components made from cardboard and scrap metal, as well as a variety of image transfer and printing methods.
Robert Motherwell is considered one of the great American Abstract Expressionist painter and one of the leading writers, theorists, and advocates of the New York School. He forged close friendships with the European Surrealists and other intellectuals over his interests in poetry and philosophy, and as such served as a vital link between the pre-war avant-garde in Europe and its post-war counterpart in New York. “It’s not that the creative act and the critical act are simultaneous,” Motherwell said. “It’s more like you blurt something out and then analyze it.” Again, it seems that there the creative process demands a mindfulness and presence, a letting go to the unfolding process of art making – a flow state perhaps. Motherwell seems to have really bridged the gap by critically analyzing the work and thus elevating it in a different light.
Cy Twombly‘s expressive drips and active, scribbled, and scratched lines in his paintings were his hallmark. “My line is childlike but not childish,” he once said. “It is very difficult to fake…to get that quality you need to project yourself into the child’s line. It has to be felt.” His work was sometimes dismissed as “high-art graffiti,” but he also produced sculptures made of found objects, clay, and plaster, painted white to suggest an affinity to Classicism. Again, I don’t think young children, before the age of 7 or 8, judge their lines so critically and harshly as we eventually are socially conditioned to do. The immediacy of the feeling and emotion in the act of creation is meant to transport the viewer.
MONICA HEISER 