Agnes Martin Interview

Agnes Martin was a fiercely independent artist with a singularly distinct personality. She was a painter imbued with tremendous intuition and sensitivity. Many people who are locked into a purely figurative mode of seeing the world upon encountering Agnes Martin's art feel perplexed and often become angry. It is basic instinct to reject what is not familiar or immediately understood. We compare everything with our own past experience. Martin's paintings point to what we don't know or fear and this is what is necessary now more than ever.  Sometimes it takes time to become accustomed to or understand that which is foreign or difficult to our experience of the world.
 
Agnes Martins art has had a profound influence on how i look at myself and my place in the world. She pointed out the way along with others to a place where silence, isolation and transcendence become friends not enemies to be avoided. Her lesson to me was to embrace what we fear and let those things move us closer in touch with higher aesthetic sensibilities and maturity.
 
Agnes Martin is a gem if you can stop long enough and really look at what she was trying to say and show in her paintings. Long after she passed away her elegantly austere work continues to call us to a higher place of understanding. I hope you will learn more about this great but often misunderstood artist of the 20th century. This interview was recorded toward the end of her life.

I'll come back and look at Agnes Martin a little more later!