Detail of Niche Door by Robyn Gordon. Wood Carving 63cm x 70cm x 6.5cm (24" x 27")
It's been a lucky week! Three good sales and a parcel of new books arriving on my doorstep.....
A little breathing space to page through my new books before starting my next carving.
Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective, is the most beautiful book! Lee's work is strikingly different to anything I've seen before. At first glance these pieces look like metal sheets patched together but they actually consist of canvas and scavenged fabrics stretched over welded steel frameworks, stitched with wire. They are extremely powerful and one wonders where these ideas came from. What inspires an artist to create something like this?
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An article by Diane Calder gives a little insight .....
"As Bontecou worked in her studio, her short wave radio broadcasted threats of attack by (cold war) terrorists or news of horrific events in Africa. Fear and anger that she had felt as a child, about the Holocaust, began to surface. “I’d get so depressed that I’d have to stop and turn to more open work. Work that I felt was more optimistic--where for example, there might be just one single opening, and the space beyond it was like opening up into the heavens, going up into space, feeling space. The other kind of work was like war equipment. With teeth. Not many people realize that. But the funny thing is that those canvases ended in German museums or Israeli ones. Just where they belonged, without my saying a thing. One of those pieces went to the Jewish Museum in New York. It was a sort of memorial of my feelings. I never titled any of these. Once I started to and it seemed to limit people to a certain response, so I didn’t continue.”
"The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable." - Robert Henri
