Night Blue by Angela O’Keeffe

Author:Angela, O’Keeffe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781925760774
Publisher: Transit Lounge

18

I am not a painter and have never aspired to be one. I did not know until I left school that I wanted to write about painting. But painting and words had found me long before. When I was eight, I visited a friend’s house after school. Her grandmother lived with the family and she sat knitting in a corner. It was a big family: a long-legged teenager came in, stood staring in front of the open fridge, took a piece of some food, slammed the fridge and was gone; a toddler ran around the room, laughing, while an older child chased him. ‘Don’t make him fall,’ warned the mother, who stood at the sink washing up. Another baby was growing in her stomach; the bulge beneath her dress pushed against the sink as she stacked foamy plates into the dishrack. My friend and I sat at the table eating sliced banana on thick buttered bread. No one took any notice of us, much less of the grandmother knitting in the corner, and yet the click of the needles and her quiet concentration seemed to hold everything together in that room. By chance, a few weeks later, when we were in Sydney staying with my aunt during the school holidays, my parents took me to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. It was hot, we’d spent every day for a week at the beach, and now my mother insisted on ‘something educational’. In the gallery I stood before Grace Cossington Smith’s The Sock Knitter, and of course I thought of my friend’s grandmother. The connection between the real-life image and the painting fused in me as a kind of portent.

My thesis centred on Lee’s and Helen’s roles in the development of Abstract Expressionism, and in Helen’s case, colour field painting, which was an offshoot of Abstract Expressionism that Helen herself was the instigator of. These were roles that, I argued, had been under-acknowledged. Abstract Expressionism, by the way, was a term that critics such as Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg used. The artists never liked the term as much as the critics did, nor did they necessarily adhere to its principles. Critics describe boundaries that artists can’t help but breach. Helen was in fact Greenberg’s girlfriend for a time when she was in her early twenties. He was much older, already an influential critic, and never once did he mention her name in print. Even taking into consideration an understandable desire on his part to avoid being seen as biased, given their intimate relationship, this was a glaring omission. He never gave her credit for her groundbreaking painting, Mountains and Sky, as the first example of what would become known as colour field painting.

You might have met Helen when you were still with Jackson; she visited his studio with Greenberg on several occasions around the time you were painted. She was dark- eyed with a striking smile that had traces of worry in it, and the worry made her more beautiful.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.