ANN BALDWIN'S ART STUDIO
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I've just
returned from a 3-week trip to England and France to visit my 2 daughters and
their children. I make the pilgrimage to London, where my younger daughter and
most of my family lives, about once a year so it's not very surprising that most
of my time is spent reuniting with relatives rather than pursuing art. Still, I
did manage an evening at the reconstructed Globe Theater where I saw a really
superb performance of "Hamlet", which is bound to inspire a painting
or two.
The highlight of my trip was a visit to the Tate
Modern, a newly converted former power station, which houses an enormous
and very comprehensive collection of modern art. I had thought I would manage to
see the entire collection in one day, but it is just too vast to take in that
quickly. There are dozens of galleries, some rather dimly lit (or was it just
that the grey London light failed to penetrate the skylights?), categorized very
strangely. One section is devoted to History/Memory/Society in which one
of the sub-categories is The Grid! Mondrian's in there and De Stijl. One
room is full of enlarged manifestos of various art movements, such as Fluxus.
One thing you can say is that Tate Modern gives a clear and full picture of
modern and contemporary art history. This must be why the place was swarming
with school groups, making it very difficult to have an uninterrupted view of
the work at times. Mark Rothko has a huge room all to himself in the
Landscape/Matter/Environment sector. I was anticipating a chapel-like atmosphere
with floating rectangles glowing eerily, but instead I encountered the Seagram
Murals lurking dimly in the half-light - apparently the way he wanted them
displayed. They give an oppressive sense of brownness as opposed to the
translucence of his better-known work. Still, there were a couple of good
examples of the latter in a room with other artists' works.
Unlike some of the art critics I was most impressed by Louise
Bourgeois' huge bronze spider installed in the Turbine Room. I is three stories
high and absolutely awesome.
In an exhibition like this, you couldn't possibly like it
all. Bridget Riley's Op Art paintings from the 60's are so visually disturbing
that I had to cover my eyes. Jackson Pollock's 'Summertime Number 9A' looked
curiously like wallpaper compared to the subtlety of his wife, Lee Krasner's,
work. Highlights for me were Matisse's 'The Snail' (paper cutouts), Gorky's
'Waterfall', the Duchamp room containing replicas of his famous urinal ,'The
Large Glass', and 'Fresh Widow', and Susan Hiller's 'From the Freud Museum' - a
mixed media piece which she was invited to make in Freud's last house in
Hampstead. She has created a mini-exhibition of worthless artifacts and trivia
displayed in archeological specimen boxes, all neatly labeled. They had a truly
magical effect on me and I wished I had time to read every word and examine
every box. The odd thing is that if I'd seen them in an archeological museum,
I'd have been overcome with boredom. Such an attack of boredom came as I walked
past Damien Hirst's 'Forms Without Life', a display of shells in a glass
cabinet. By contrast, if they'd been in the Natural History Museum, I'd have
found them fascinating!
Exhausted, we decided to take a break for lunch around noon,
but the lines outside the museum cafes were so long that we ate in a pub by the
Thames with a view of the notorious Millennium Bridge which sways so much when
walked upon that it has been closed to the public. By the time I'd sat there for
a while, I couldn't face the thought of another few hours in the Tate, so we
went off to the galleries in Cork Street instead. Nothing much there to inspire
me, these being the dead summer months.
In the South of France I took a day out at the Fondation Maeght in St. Paul-de-Vence. What a superb setting this was for a large show of the Nude in the XX Century - Picasso, Matisse, Richier, Bacon, Bonnard, Giacometti, even Basquiat, they were all here beautifully displayed and I was allowed to take photographs. The grounds and courtyards are full of sculpture by Miro and Giacometti. Then off to the town itself to check out the galleries. Not so good! There are dozens picturesquely crammed into the narrow cobbled streets, but most contain formulaic, brash, or tourist art. I discovered more to inspire me in the centuries-old doors and windows of the old houses.
Back home in California I'm free to make my own art at last. Each day I spend several hours painting happily. The Sausalito Art Festival is still 6 weeks off, so I feel I can paint what I like at this stage. I began this week by tearing up an old copy of U.S. News and sticking the pages onto the blank canvas. This was intended to be an underpainting, but I found myself reacting to the images and using them as focal points. I decided to break away from my usual muted gold colors and go straight in with a primary red. Very bold. I covered most of it up later, though for all I know I'll paint it back in again soon. I've taken digital photos of the various stages of the painting to show its progression. I've posted them on the In the Studio page. Take a look now!
Visit other Archives:
January 2000
entry (New Year's Resolutions)
February
2000 entry (Painting in the Mexican Jungle)
April
2000 entry (Attending Bay Area art openings)
December
2000 (A Look Back at the Year 2000)
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I'm learning Photoshop online at College of Marin. Want to see my beginning attempts at digital painting? Click here Be warned!