Saltworkstudio   Suzanne Edminster

Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning and others are the bad boys of abstraction.  Sometimes their cultural mileu of hard-drinking, smoking, angst-ridden New York painting seems centuries away.  Abstract Expressionism and the American Experience by Irving Sandler brings clarity into the sometimes confusing scene.

This is a beautiful volume. Each chapter is an essay on a different historical aspect of abstract expressionism, including field and gesture painting and the influence of mythic metaphors and WW2. I enjoyed the clarity of Sandler's observations over more than 50 years of direct cultural experience of the times-- he was born in 1925. Though younger than many of the painters, he was there.  His voice has a resonant authenticity that is far deeper than the art-speak of more recent criticism.

The book contains many gems. Motherwell describes the advantages of Pollock's horizontal, easel-free painting style, a revelation providing insight into the hidden deliberation of the drip paintings.  Gesture paintings were inspired by the improvisations of jazz.

Sandler writes: Like musicians, they radically reduced the distance between the composition and performance, extended the expressive range of their mediums, and aspired to find their own voices... Dave Brubeck mirrored the artists' thinking when he wrote, "I aim at the inspired moment; that is, the balance of human emotion, creativity, imagination, and a technical facility equal to the idea of the moment."

Inspired, and inspiring. Recommended.

Last night, I was looking through a pile of stuff on a cafe table: Jehovah's Witness Watchtowers, discarded newpaper ads, psychic services available---you know the sort of thing.  Into my hand fell a 2010 bird calender open to a flicker for December.  I guess he's supposed to be my bird pin-up guy, and he is quite handsome, I must say.  What this has to do with painting, I haven't the faintest-- but it is amazing how Whatever sorts these things out for us and plays them on the movies in our head.  What do these birds mean for my painting?  How many times must I be presented with this image?  Knock knock, who's there?

Etomology of the word flicker:
to move waveringly, flutter: to burn unsteadily... a brief movement, a tremor.. slang, a movie...an inconstant or wavering light.  That last phrase could describe the flame of art which, for many, burns unsteadily. From the Old English flikaren, to flutter.

In last Sunday's Sebastopol Center for the Arts Class, I was doing a demonstration of my very primitive negative painting so-called method.  I was trying to make a floral arrangement or perhaps some trees in a landscape.   I was painting upside down so the painting's "right side" was toward the class.  Sudenly people began calling out "I see a pig! I see a pig!" Many saw a pig's head with an alcohol splash ring on what I regarded as the pigs bu.... I mean, rear end.  So , in the end , a fat little boar of some kind appeared, a sort of Ferdinand the hog, sniffing a flower.  If you're a proponent of spontanaeity in painting, you'll get surprises, like it or not!

While splashing paint in my Barracks studio, I heard a tapping on the window, which looks out on to an oak tree. On the windowsill was a very large spotted bird  tentatively tapping the glass with a wicked-looking pointy bill. Spectacular... he had red and black and these beautiful fawn spots.  We looked at each other in the eyes before he moved on.  Knock, knock, knock on the windowpane... wake up, Suzanne!   I rushed out and bought an Audobon Birds of the West identifier.  He was a flicker, a large woodpecker.
There are many synchronicities in painting.  Last year I did a series of large abstracts with a trickster bird tapping on windowpanes.  And the book I was reading, "Kinds of Power" by James Hillman, more or less fell open to a page where he listed hawks and woodpeckers as belonging to the planet Mars, for dangerous, fierce heart energy and passion.   Even the name flicker evokes flame and the color red.  And that wicked beak can probe out sustanance or, equally, draw blood, as all good weapons do.
He seemed to me to evoke iron oxide red, a flaming sienna, a red flash of fire arriving on a two-heater day.