Sol LeWitt
Sol LeWitt talked about his wall drawing: “as long as the plans were followed, the artist is satisfied with the wall drawing. What they look like is not important to artist.” I referenced this concept of creating art in my artwork, through writing words/sentences without concrete shape. It is not important for audience to see what I have wrote. The high concentrate mark making process is important and it guides me into a certain level of consciousness – ecstasy which I think it is also a representation of satisfying.
I like the systematic order of his artwork and his rigorous way to analyse lines even he said he is not a systematic artist. In my artwork I use line as an object to depict other stuffs. In LeWitt’s artwork, he paint line form as a subject to further research. The outcome of his artworks are unpredictable and full of attraction.
LeWitt thinks theory is much important than art. He writes: “It doesn’t really matter if the viewer understands the concepts of the artist by seeing the art. Once it is out of his hand the artist has no control over the way the viewer will perceive the work. Different people will understand the same thing in a different way.” For me, I think as modern contemporary art, we do not make art absolutely the same as their subject matters exist in the world. We create art based on the idea behind it. Artist should have their own art theory/philosophy first, then start to find their focus point in the whole art world. What artist need to do is making art and attract the audience who has the similar philosophy with you. Artist is an occupation to express and to make artwork for people who do not have patient, time, idea, etc to do art.
He thinks: “the boundless creative energy that produces them, an energy transmitted not by the artist personally as self-expression, but by the concept, or medium, the artist has chosen.” I do think the concept play the most important role in any artwork, which I referencing this idea in my artwork. Even I am writing words/sentences in my painting I get rid of their shape. I do not want the audience trying to find/understand what I am writing in my painting, because it is not important. The most value part is the writing process: I am using a Chinese brush, abstractly writing unrecognised words, and continually doing mark making without intention. This high concentrate repetition process let me ignore everything behind. The whole activity of my artwork is important rather the subject matters (what actually write there).
Kazimir Malevich
I am influenced by Malevich’s idea of Suprematism. Everything in life can be summed up into different geomatic shape. By changing the weight, width, length, etc of a shape can catch every change in lifetime. He said: “The Supremacist canvas reproduces white, but not blue space because blue does not give a true impression of the infinite. Infinite white allows the optical beam to pass without encountering any limit.” Base on this idea and aesthetic reason, I work on a pure white canvas and organised the white space. The white space I left on purpose in my painting depicts geometric shapes and object matters. It not only creates a second demotion for painting but also an imaginative space for the audience.
Agnes Martin
I was suggested to know Agnes Martin by Professor Geraint. Firstly, I was attracted by the titles of her artworks. Such as: Children Playing, Happy Holiday, Infant Response To Love… Those are very unusual names for minimal artworks, which give me a deep interest to look for how these titles came from. Her attitude about life and art influence me a lot and give me confident to keep making my art. Here are some lecture notes from a talk she gave at the University of New Mexico: “Life moves according to a growing consciousness of life and is completely unpredictable… You must believe in life. Believe that you can know the truth about life… Suffering in life being a part of life is also positive, since all of life is positive. Suffering means that you have engaged to resist death and the battle of life and death is on. Life will win…” The idea of suffering and positive attitude moves me which is quite the same feeling as I feel after I finished every one of my paintings. By seeing her artworks which gives me a huge support on keep: “ defining simple geomatic vocabulary, working with reduce means and employing a process of repetition”.
Louis Bourgeois
I saw a video on Youtube: Louise Bourgeois – 'I Transform Hate Into Love' | TateShots. It in at the very beginning also shows in the title of this video, Louis said: “I transform hate into love. It is really what I did.” Art play a role in turning bad to good. In my art practice, my inspirations are coming from the bad, negative thought. However, the artwork and my emotion are full of happiness in the outcome.
Yayoi Kusama
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/yayoi-kusama-8094/yayoi-kusamas-obliteration-room
In her work, she lets audience to play with dot and stickers, to make the dot fill a white space/room. In the end the room kind of loose its own structure, all the objects: wall, chair, desk… are all cover by the sticker dots and turn to be a two-dimension surface. The room is replaced by a feeling but different people might felt differently about it.
After I saw this, I started to think :
How background works in relation to the front layer in my artwork.
Seeing installation as a 3d object or understanding it from different position as a 2d painting.
Create feeling, activity that contain audiences or create artwork with the feeling showing the result to audiences.
(can be seen as a painting.)
Eva Hesse
Hesse's work often employs multiple forms of similar shapes organized together in grid structures or clusters. Retaining some of the defining forms of minimalism, modularity, and the use of unconventional materials, she created eccentric work that was repetitive and labor-intensive.
According to one of her interview, she talked about the reason why she repeats a form over and over again:
- "Because it exaggerates. If something is meaningful, maybe it’s more meaningful said ten times. It’s not just an aesthetic choice. If something is absurd, it’s much more exaggerated, more absurd if it’s repeated … "
- "repetition does enlarge or increase or exaggerate an idea or purpose in a statement … At times I thought, ‘The more thought the greater the art'."
Most of her works have a deep relation with her physical and emotional hardship. Much like Ellsworth Kelly, who regarded painting not as a two-dimensional surface, but as an object on the wall to be extended into the space of the viewer before it. Mimicking the organic vulnerability of the human body itself, work by Hesse seems to take on a tentative or even ephemeral life of its own, its material density apparently enlivened by some invisible, psychological momentum.
By seeing her work: Ennead, Hang Up and Metronomic Irregularity I, I really enjoy the way she slip the lines out of the two-dimensional board/framed gird.
For me, the strips come out of the board with a feeling of an awakening of self-consciousness. They are not systematic, repetitive, but they are moving with an exaggerated motion. And this feeling are repeated over and over again through every motion of the lines and enlarge the idea behind these artworks.
Also, I think when we consider "repetition" it could not only be one thing that exists again and agin exactly as the previous one. Repetition can be understand diversified in artwork creation: copy objects, reuse materials, clarified style shows up in different artwork, even the motion of how to make artwork (spill colour, sweep material from left to right...), etc. I prefer Hesse works include strips, lines even they were formed differently, intricately they are repetitive materials exist in these artworks. When spectator look at her artwork and link them together, her preference of material, her style, her idea about disturb regularity will emerge.
In her artwork Repetition III, the idea of repeat represents strongly through the material and every object in this artwork. Even each shape of the object are not the same. Like Hesse said:" Like many artists of her generation, she explored repetition but, unlike her peers, she did not adhere to uniformity. None of these bucket-like forms are exactly alike, nor do they have a set order."
Jasper Johns and his "crosshatch" painting/prints
Johns developed his motif of crosshatched lines in increasingly complex systems, experimenting with colors, patterns, mirroring and reversals. According to the artist, the inspiration for his crosshatched works came from a pattern he glimpsed on a car that quickly passed him on a highway, “I only saw it for a second, but knew immediately that I was going to use it. It had all the qualities that interest me – literalness, repetitiveness, an obsessive quality, order with dumbness, and the possibility of a complete lack of meaning.” And it is hard to decipher the meaning behind Johns’ crosshatched works, the titles can sometimes provide clues.
Most of his crosshatch prints are employing lines of primary and secondary colors. And he overprinted each impression with the primary and secondary colors he had already used, “because different colors of ink overlapping do different things, make different effects.” The complete set together provides the viewer with the opportunity to, in Johns’s own words, “…see what it is that connects them and what it is that separates them. Because the experience of one is rarely the experience of the other.” For example: Cicada.
Yayoi Kusama
Kusama's Infinity Net series marks the beginning of a radical shift in her work from the singular abstract, biomorphic forms she painted during her youth to the more obsessive, repetitive works that would define her career. When Kusama talked about her artwork:" "With just one polka dot, nothing can be achieved. In the universe, there is the sun, the moon, the earth, and hundreds of millions of stars. All of us live in the unfathomable mystery and infinitude of the universe. Pursuing philosophy of the universe through art under such circumstances has led me to what I call stereotypical repetition." As Kusama explains, "without beginning, end, or center. The entire canvas would be occupied by [a] monochromatic net. This endless repetition caused a kind of dizzy, empty, hypnotic feeling."
Although the obsessive and time-consuming Nets were painstaking to create, they proved therapeutic for the artist.
E.g: No.F
While observing the randomly/systematic repetition, spectator might catch a feeling of satisfaction. Not only because the artwork contain universe philosophy that we can realise the whole world from different parts of the details, but also we are connected with time (the time is represented by the process). Even this is a two-dimension surface it introduce a four-dimension space, for audiences. To put themselves into the world filled with subjective objects, infectious time and effort.
As for the aesthetic function for her artworks:
create a chance for spectators to perceive their intellection about time, space, world they live in.
prove therapeutic for artist herself.
Jennifer Bartlett
Bartlett’s use of dots, brushstrokes, and vivid color connects her work to that of Post-Impressionists such as Vincent Van Gogh and Georges Seurat, whom she acknowledged as influential to her work. Her systematic use of grids aligns her work with that of Close who used them to reveal his process of creating realist illusion. Bartlett employed the grid format to structure her paintings while allowing for playful flexibility.
This is her most important contributor to 20th-century art due to her innovative use of baked enamel on steel plates. Path is a classic example of Bartlett’s mature style and innovative use of baked enamel on steel. Bartlett portrays the small box-like houses of a contemporary suburb, sub-divided by the eponymous path of the painting’s title. Partly tongue-in-cheek critique and partly celebratory, it connects the eminent history of landscape painting with a contemporary, updated image of the minimal suburban landscape. Analytical and lyrical, this work also reflects the artist’s transformation of the prevailing Minimalist aesthetic of the 1960s into something distinctly her own.
House: Dark Plaid, 1998
Oil on canvas
50 x 50 in. 127 x 127 cm
Path, 1998
Oil over screenprint on baked enamel on steel plates
64*64 in
By seeing one of Bartlett's interview, I know she likes to read and write poetry and use them as reference in her artwork. (Interview Link)
She talked about when she was writing sometimes "feels like an unconscious level — the exception I would say is punctuation". Also "about the semi-conscious and dreams. And in your books I like the repetition because it has a unifying effect on free verse and ties the books together, or so I think. I sometimes repeat phrases in a book that I consider to be like 'refrains' in a musical composition. I like the often obsessive nature of repetition in poetry including repetition of sounds so you know poems that rhyme, formal poems where lines are repeated like in a pantoum, or words repeated like in a sestina etc. "
I know her idea about using repetition came from unconsciousness with her personal reaction to the object/poetry defined experiences. But she combine poetry and her artwork together to approach the expression about landscape, beauty, nature, suburban... She builds up a grid block system in her work which might comes from our social life: basic living unity --- block. All of the object elements are abstracted from her life experiences.
Bastian Muhr is a Germany artist. Most of his works are an artistic interaction with the boundaries of the pictures, with their perception and ascertainability. Muhr uses reduced means – often merely lines and dots – to create an exciting interplay between seeing and not seeing, space and surface, emptiness and density, movement and immobility, design and realisation.
The works above are series of his drawings called --- "Site-specific" drawing.
They were made in a ready-made open, indoor space. Muhr made drawing using size fixed white marker. I think his idea about drawing different lines/shapes is based on the floor and space reaction, even the size of each pattern.
I like they way he made temporary artwork in museum in such huge size. By seeing the video of his process and exhibition sense, I think everyone stand in that space do have an emotion like worshipful about the work.
It is very interesting contrast because these drawings are painted on the floor not on the wall which is very unusual with other space artworks. Meanwhile, for me, I think making very flat surface on the floor is a way to reducing the sense of honour of easel drawing/painting. However, we can see in the video every viewer are very careful and cherish about their steps and interacting with floor drawing.