William M Boot - Blog

Bridget Riley

29/4/2014

Bridget Riley is a British painter who found fame and notoriety in the 60's having been included in a now famous exhibition in New York titled "The Responsive Eye". The artworks in this show were labelled "Op art" and derided unfairly by many critics for what was seen as novelty and gimmickry. This art challenged the viewers perception and was difficult to understand because of it's more scientific nature and the questions it raised about human perception and the function of sight and the brain. Following the large, mysterious and often austere abstract canvasses of the "Abstract Expressionists" in the 50's this new art required thought and attention.

Bridget's work was bought and promptly reduced to patterns on high end women's fashion garments in the USA producing a strong reaction from the art community. Her art had been misunderstood and denigrated being reduced to mass produced factory commodities. Few people understood clearly her rigorous program of inquiry into human perception and the operation of colour in painting. Bridget keeps extending knowledge based on the the work of Seurat, Bonnard, the Impressionists and earlier painters such as Poussin and their interest in the operation of colour and light on a constructed surface.

Even though my art isn't directly linked to such an intense scientific interest in vision and perception nevertheless her work has influenced me greatly. Her use of composition, line and colour challenge the eye and inspire me to extend my work using reduced means. I think Bridget is one of the most intelligent and articulate arts practitioners i've ever come across in my research.

I've included a 3 part documentary here on Bridget which is a bit dated but very informative as she explains her painting methodology.

There are many good books written by her and other authors including "The Eye's Mind" and "Bridget Riley: Dialogues On Art" which i use as a regular reference. I hope you'll take time to investigate her art further.

Agnes Martin Interview

24/4/2014

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!

Max Cole

18/4/2014

I became aware of Max Coles paintings serendipitously about 6 years ago in the course of my research and quickly recognised similarities to what i was trying to accomplish in my artworks. She is also working with reduced colour schemes and repetitive mark making in an attempt to construct austere yet rich meditative fields of painted order. Choosing to empty her canvas of overt figuration she opens up the possibilities for a whole new kind of discourse bringing together contemporary approaches to process and content in painting. Her practice picks up where the Abstract Expressionists left off and the Minimalists began in the early sixties. Explanations for the influences informing her sparse poetic surfaces range from religious experience to the geographical sway of the vast midwest American flatlands where she was born.

What i admire is her tenacity in following what is true to her vision. Her art isn't trendy, as far as i know, so her success and recognition fly in the face of current art world fashion. This means simply that people have recognised the integrity in her painting project. She's in it for the long haul, for good or for bad, for rich or for poor because that's what she does.

Minimal abstract painting fell out of the mainstream art world some time ago displaced by photographs, model-making, digital installations and monumental hybridised constructions. It seems though that there is still an appreciation for contemplative painted surfaces skilfully crafted and presented. Like Agnes Martin, a contemporary of hers, Max Cole remains true to the spirit of painting.

There isn't a lot of material available on this under appreciated artist but a good artists monograph can be purchased from Amazon. I've provided a few images of reasonable quality to give you an idea of Max Coles work. I hope you take the time to look at her art more closely. Below is the link to a PDF of an interview with the artist at ps.org should you wish to understand her thinking on a few ideas. http://www.personalstructures.org/index.phppage=404&lang=en&item=443&n=3

Yayoi Kusama Interview

15/4/2014

Yayoi Kusama is undoubtedly Japan's premier international artist. I say this on the basis of what she has accomplished over the last 60 years or more. She may in fact be the founder or at least co-founder of a number of what are now considered international art movements or styles which appeared in the late 50's and early 60's in the USA including minimalism, pop, feminist art, installation and happenings. She has worked across diverse media such as film, event, collage, painting and writing. It is difficult to classify her work but if an attempt were made it may be something in the order of "abstract fantasist" or "dot transcendentalist".

Yayoi has had an enormous and far reaching effect on the global art world and this impact can be seen in the younger generation of illustrative artists like Takashi Murakami who mimic her surreal pattern based works. Her battle with a hallucinatory condition since she was young has definitely shaped and informed her art and it could be said that her work is in fact the method of choice to stave off madness.

Yayoi Kusama's work has influenced my work primarily by her use of mostly monochromatic colour schemes. Many of her paintings and installations consist of two colours and usually a black or a white combined with a red or orange or yellow. These austere choices of colour produce a directness and when used with mirrors produce a hypnotic sense of "graphic endlessness" or infinity.

Personally i think by painting infinity she attempts to quell her fears of mortality but there is no doubt that her creativity has changed the way we see our world today. That is the amazing power of art! I admire Yayoi's tenacity in the face of daily adversity and the way she has produced something significant for the common good. There is plenty of information online about her and i encourage you to check her out.

Giorgio Morandi

11/4/2014

What can be said about the great, late master painter Giorgio Morandi that will grant justice to his extraordinary body of work. This painter i think more than any other has influenced and inspired me to greater heights. Much has been written about this artist while he was alive and subsequent to his passing in 1964. He achieved critical acclaim in his lifetime and even more after his death and justifiably so.

If anyone were to ask "What makes an artist or art great"? it is always hard to give a clear answer. The necessary criteria for a great art or artist isn't so easily defined. This is more so in the current period of time where almost "anything goes" under the rubric of "I can, so i do" and of course many artists avail themselves of this freedom. Unfortunately, it is getting more and more difficult to identify that art which has substance and i'm talking here about the inherent rigorous nature of the artists vision and intelligence which rests in the art work itself. I'm not talking about scale here, i'm talking about monumentality in the work itself!

Morandi's work acts as a yardstick to measure quality by and what a big yardstick it is! Much artwork today when put to the Morandi test is "found wanting" for lack of a better term. What do i mean by this? I mean, the singularity of vision and the working through of fundamental problems contingent to the medium and the epoch is absent in the work itself. We can talk here about certain object qualities such as beauty, mystery, sublimity, innate materiality, transcendence, intelligence and author attribute signification. There are some potent examples of this, for example, Rembrandt, Picasso, Vermeer, Goya, Manet, Caravaggio, Martin, Judd to name just a few where the work is imbued with a singularity that no on can dispute. The work is synonymous with the artist and with the time in which they lived and worked, although often embodied revolutionary notions and future portent.

In short, Morandi is the embodiment of what an artist should be attempting and the work is evidence of what can be done if a singularity of vision is present.
This video is short and does little justice to the man or his work; it is just a glimpse. Morandi was a private man and averse to public adulation for the most part and died prior to the digital media generation so not much is available in the way of interviews or biographical material on film.

Please check out his work further online as many images and some articles are available to read. There are also a number of excellent academic books available which attempt to examine and explain his work including, "Giorgio Morandi: The Art Of Silence" by Janet Abramowicz a former assistant of his.

Ben Beeton - Art & Science

9/4/2014

Art and science have shared coterminous territory since the beginning of man's attempt to understand his world. Since ancient times there has been a steady unfolding of knowledge as indigenous cultures worldwide developed pictographs, ideograms and different modes of drawing in their attempts at signifying meaning. The urge to depict the natural world really exploded during the Renaissance with artists like Durer and Leonardo Da Vinci who merged scientific observation with artistic concerns. With the Enlightenment and categorisation of knowledge came an explosion of scientific illustration and artistic innovation.

Art and Science are not wholly disparate ventures but intertwined as they are both engaged in an unfolding dialogue concerned with observation of the natural world, experimentation and the expansion of understanding of the universe in which we live.
Ben Beeton is an artist from Queensland in Australia who is continuing this art historical discourse and is passionately involved in painting ecology and geology through his investigations and study of deep time history. Although primarily a painter he has and does use various media to open out and contribute to current debates in Earth Science surrounding issues of past events and origins. He believes it is necessary to experience the environment first hand so makes regular excursions into remote areas where data is scant or unavailable.

Ben's passion for science is unmistakeable and he aims to contribute to the current investigations surrounding ideas that in some cases remain controversial. His pursuits have involved him in collaborations with many professionals from different areas of academia. To date he has visited and documented many areas of Australia and New Zealand producing a beautifully diverse series of works and images.

Ben's passion and commitment to his art has been an inspiration to me for many years. Although our interests seem to be unrelated in many ways, nevertheless there is a strange resonance that occurs between his work and mine.
You can visit Ben's You Tube channel or website at benbeeton.com if you wish to learn more about this amazing artist and his work.

Jean Giraud "Moebius" Interview

6/4/2014

This interview with French artist Jean Giraud also known as "Moebius" gives some sense of who he was and what his motivations really were. I think he was one of only a few great 20th century illustrative artists that had a distinct and unique imagination and buckets of creative talent. Jean Giraud remained unknown to me as an identity until recently and known only through his contributions to films like, "Alien", "The Fifth Element" and "Tron".

I admire his ability to use colour in such a subtle manner. I don't make any distinction in art about creative ability or what medium(s) artists choose to work in. What i'm looking for is that common point of intersection between their work and mine. When i saw the colour schemes in Jean Girauds drawings there was a resonance with what he was attempting to do. Any artist will tell you how difficult colour can be to understand and manage. Colour is a universe unto itself so the challenge is always there for me personally to get it right over and over again.

Whether you like comics or graphic art or not, Jean Giraud's art deserves respect and praise for both his process and his development of concepts. I hope you'll investigate his work a little more after watching this short video.

(I've chosen not to talk about Sylvain here as he wasn't part of my objective for writing this page. This in no way belittles him as an also significant creative artist).

Some tribute videos can be viewed at http://youtu.be/ZYZLuObrL1s and http://youtu.be/CiNsc2UjoqI

Art Residence In Denmark

5/4/2014

It's been 1 month since we arrived in Denmark. The time we've spent here at Gaesteatelier Hollufgard art residency in Odense so far has been inspiring. The Danish people have been warm, friendly and very helpful. The weather has been variable but on the chilly side most days. It's spring and the best time to be here as we are watching nature come alive a little bit more each day. The colours and mood have influenced my new paintings very much. Stephanie and i spend a lot of time in the studio as our time here is short. I strongly recommend that anyone interested in an o'seas art residency consider Denmark. It's just a hop, skip and jump to other European destinations if you want to experience other cultures.

Gerhard Richter Interview

4/4/2014

Gerhard Richter is another late 20th century painter that is misunderstood by many. His mild self-effacing manner hides a man of clear resolve, sharp insight and dry wit. Looking back through his work of the last 60 years we can now see in near totality his one man revisionist project of "Western painting". He is a painter of tremendous skill and vision and this is borne out in the writing and exhibitions on his work that can be accessed easily by most. When i first saw his work 14 years ago i wasn't sure what to make of it. With time i have come to appreciate his painting in a greater way.

Yes, he has the methodical, routine, almost droll teutonic approach to what he does but this should not be mistaken as clinical or academic as he truly is a "man of his time". The sensitivity and thought that goes into what he creates is not always immediate but take some time and with a little patience you will begin to see a great artist at work. His paintings are not empty exercises but embrace a wide range of concepts and human emotions. Gerhard is getting older but his mind is as sharp as ever. I'm always wondering what he'll do next and what stone remains for him to turn over.

I'll be coming back to Gerhard later to look at his work more closely!

Please take the time to investigate him further; there is a lot to be learnt from him.

Sean Scully Interview

1/4/2014

Sean Scully is one of the most enduring abstract painters of the late 20th century. He has been a great influence on my artistic development over the last 20 years. I like his intelligence and artistic sensitivity to the world. He is goal oriented and persistent in the face of constant changes in artistic trends and fashion. I admire his singular vision in painting yet all the while remaining open to enquiry.

I will return to Sean later and examine his work in more detail.

I hope you will take the time to check out the many excellent videos about Sean on YouTube and learn a bit more about his work.