February 2012
113 posts
“I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality.”
—Barnett Newman
“I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.”
—Barnett Newman
“i dont want more money. i want more respect. i dont want more power. i want more love. i dont want more despair. i want more hope.”
—(via bonafiderojas)
“Some black artists thought that in order to be seen as an artist first, they had to eliminate
the black figure from their work and turn to abstraction… But I wanted to find out if there
was a way to get respect for my work on aesthetic terms without having to dispose of the
black figure…” —Kerry James Marshall
the black figure from their work and turn to abstraction… But I wanted to find out if there
was a way to get respect for my work on aesthetic terms without having to dispose of the
black figure…” —Kerry James Marshall
“The lives of black people in America are bracketed by big subjects—slavery, freedom, disenfranchisement, the political struggle for equality. They are easy stories to choose, but there is another… less dramatic story that also needs to be represented: I mean the day-to-day ambivalence of black people about participating fully in the American dream.”
—Kerry James Marshall
“You can’t be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central [L.A.] near the Black Panthers* headquarters, and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility. You can’t move to Watts in 1963 and not speak about it.”
—Kerry James Marshall
“
After abstract expressionism, a lot of artists haven’t been trained to manipulate material. Instead, they’ve been taught that what they’re supposed to manipulate is concepts or ideas. To me, this is absolutely responsible for a lot of weaknesses in artists’ production at this point. I’m an advocate of a return to very fundamental, very basic studio practices, which means that you first spend a lot of your time trying to figure out what materials will do, and in the process of figuring that out, you figure out what to do with them. […]
If my teacher Charles White said anything really important to me, it was that you have to worry about making the best paintings and the best drawings you can, and the ideas will take care of themselves. I believe that wholeheartedly. I don’t think there’s anything worse than having a good idea that’s poorly realized. And if you hope to break through to something meaningful, in terms of the relationship between form and content, it’s gotta come out of a more experimental approach to material - a more experimental practice. That way, you see the possibility in materials for constructing meaning. If you don’t understand the capacity of materials to carry meaning - if you don’t have a certain set of skills - you’re limited in your range to simple expressions, rather than complex ideas. Because what you’re simply doing is selecting from meanings that are already prescribed or described.
” —Kerry James Marshall