On painting

Snow, benda 2008

I paint because as Eckhart Tolle so eloquently said. “All we can perceive, experience, think about is the surface layer of reality,
less than the tip of the iceberg.”

The Journey

benda 2006

Painting is the process of eliminating all that I understand. It is the unpeeling of all the layers of my thoughts and images to find the most basic forms that reveal the simplest truths.

Acceptance

Jim Dine
I have come to terms with a lot of things, because, when all's said and done, there's really very little one can do about a lot of things. You just accept them. The point is you just have to keep on working and you just have to keep on living. (Jim Dine)

Responsibility

Oskar Kokoschka

I consider myself responsible to the coming generations, which are left stranded in a blitzed world, unaware of the soul trembling in awe before the mystery of life. (Oskar Kokoschka)

Why we do what we do

Keith Haring
The best reason to paint is that there is no reason to paint....I'd like to pretend that I've never seen anything, never read anything, never heard anything...and then make something....Every time I make something I think about the people who are going to see it and every time I see something, I think about the person who made it....Nothing is important...so everything is important."
~ Keith Haring (June 15, 1986 NYC)

The struggle

earth day 2009 benda
encaustic on wood

The artist struggle is universal. Every artist can identify with it. It makes no difference if you produce a masterpiece or not. It is part of the process. Perhaps that is how we are all alike. United in our angst.

Subject matter

Georgia O'Keeffe
Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or a tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colors put together so they say something. Georgia O'Keeffe

safety and sterility

Picasso

"Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility." Picasso

I have always thought that if you play it too safe you risk becoming a imitation of yourself. benda

Grace Hartigan

Sweden by Grace Hartigan

1979 May 10, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

I remember this painting of mine in the Whitney Museum called “Sweden,” and that’s dedicated to Franz Kline because Franz and I were very good friends and he used to tease me in various ways. I’m Irish but he says I look like a Swedish skier. And he came into the studio one time and I had this painting, and I was worried because I thought maybe the lower right hand corner wasn’t up to the upper left hand corner, and I was complaining to Franz. He looked at me with disbelief and he said, “You mean you want to make it better?” I thought, “Oh, God, that is humiliating. I’m supposed to be some little shopper who’s trying to get the best bargain in a grocery store.” And I’ve never forgotten that, that once the impulse, once the emotion is over, that to fix it up is a rather humiliating plan because then it’s just a patch-over and you’re a shoemaker or something, not an artist.

Direction

Painter Burt Dickerson said" The inspiration for the next painting is the previous painting. We start a movement and we build on it."
The authors of the book Art and Fear write, "What you need to know how the next piece is contained in the last piece."
This is why I like to do work in a series.
I worked for 100 days just on birds.
benda 2008

Rejection

ruhl-benda 2009
Jackie Battenfield, whose new book The Artist's Guide, writes: "If I'm not being regularly rejected, it means I'm not pursuing opportunities."

Criticism

Matisse
"I have always sought to be understood and, while I was taken to task by critics or colleagues, I thought they were right, assuming I had not been clear enough to be understood. This assumption allowed me to work my whole life without hatred and even without bitterness toward criticism, regardless of its source. I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends. Hatred, rancor, and the spirit of vengeance are useless baggage to the artist. His road is difficult enough for him to cleanse his soul of everything which could make it more so." Matisse

The Ecstasy

Van gogh
"The only time I feel alive is when I'm painting." Vincent Van Gogh

The agony

Helen Frankenthaler


"Every so often every artist feels, 'I'll never paint again. The muse has gone out the window.' In 1985, I hardly painted at all for three months, and it was agonizing. I looked at reproductions. I stared at Matisse. I stared at the Old Masters. I stared at the Quattrocento. And I thought to myself - Don't push it! If you try too hard to get at something, you almost push it away." Helen Frankenthaler

When is a painting finished

benda 2009 (maybe)

In response to the question "How do you know when you're finished?", Jackson Pollock replied "How do you know when you're finished making love?"

Painters on Painting

Mark Rothko

There are several drafts of this letter to the editor, published June 13, 1943, in which Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb responded to the Times art review by Edward Alden Jewell of their work at an exhibition at the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors.
"…We favor the simple expression of complex thought…We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth…it is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted…There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing. We assert that subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid if it is tragic and timeless."

from www.theartstory.org


Adolph Gottlieb

Early Influences

Major artistic influences.
I grew up surrounded by what I call stoic art. Still life paintings and Vermeer and Rembrandt prints.
Later, (possibly around the age of 12) I was introduced to the painting: The Gleaners. It felt different than the "stoic paintings" I was familiar with. It is a painting where the subject isn’t posed or set up to be painted. The painting captures an active moment in time and I realized that in contemporary art the painting may lose the subject matter completely and the activity becomes the painting.

Les Glaneuses (The Gleaners) by François Millet, 1857

At age 16, I was shown my fist Vincent Van Gogh painting: The Starry Night, I was blown away. The art teacher who showed it to me was comparing the similarity of the brush strokes between Van Gogh's painting and a small gouache painting of mine. The connection was immediate for me and I surged ahead studying similar artists. First, Van Gogh life and works, which lead me to the Impressionists and then Cezanne, Matisse and finally the Abstract Expressionists.
My interest in Abstract Expressionism was further fueled by my painting instructor and mentor Burton Dickerson.

I think it is important to look at what has inspired us and how as artists our experiences are rooted in images which translate into a myriad of colors, shapes and forms.

Burton Dickerson

Joan: one of my top 5

Joan Mitchell
"The painting is just a surface to be covered. Paintings aren't about the person who makes them, either. My paintings have to do with feeling, yet it's pretentious to say they're about feelings, too, because if you don't get it across, it's nothing." Joan Mitchell

Explore the web site: www.theartstory.org. This website's mission is to make Modern art more accessible and digestible to the general public by providing information that is easy-to-understand, professionally designed, and logically presented.

In the shadow of the giants

Elaine De Kooning and William De Kooning


Helen Frankenthaler (wife to Robert Motherwell)


Lee Krasner ( wife to Jackson Pollock)

The Process, again

"When I am in a painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc, because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well." Jackson Pollock

the process

."...putting down what I felt in terms of some overall image at the moment today, and perhaps being terribly disappointed with it tomorrow... trying to make it better and then despairing and destroying partially or wholly... getting back into it and just kind of frantically trying to pull something into this rectangle that made sense to me... "(Richard Diebenkorn)


Richard Diebenkorn

Abstract Art

Arshile Gorky

Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot physically see with his eyes... Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an explosion into unknown areas. (Arshile Gorky

Line

Giovanni Boldini (1842-1931)
Does it really matter that we are looking at a portrait of John Singer Sargent. Probably only to Sargent. What does matter of a great deal is the use of the positive and negative space on the picture plane. Boldini's painting is much more interesting because of what has been left out. His use of line to define space is of utmost importance.

Painting

Rich Bass in his book Fiber writes: " Art is selectivity-that which you choose to put in a story --and it's what you choose to leave out too."

Painting can be described in the same way. What is left out of the painting is as significant as what is painted on the canvas. To get a glimpse of this look backward in time, start with the minimalist, such as Agnes Martin, look at Matisse, and continue back in time.
Line is much more important than subject matter.


Agnes Martin

Color

Kandinsky wrote that "color directly influences the soul" and can "produce a correspondent spiritual vibration."


Wassily Kandinsky: Murnau Street with Women

August 1 2009

Anselm Kiefer


"I am interested in restructuring symbols. It is all about connecting with old knowledge and trying to discover continuities in why we search for heaven." Anselm Kiefer

cbenda 2009 circle series