Richard Serra on Drawing

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Richard Serra is, for me, one of the contemporary masters of drawing in his words

"to see is to think and drawing is another way of thinking."

I like the way he thinks and there are some great video interviews with Serra published online about the importance of drawing in his practice, here's just a few I found particularly illuminating.

Richard Serra on drawing as visual note-taking 2:27

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Artist Richard Serra discusses his sketches of a Le Corbusier building in Ronchamp, France, as an example of an architectural space that has inspired him.

A Conversation with Richard Serra 53:04 

Richard Serra on his Drawing retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, April 13, 2011 - August 28, 2011, with Magdalena Dabrowski and Lynne Cooke.

Richard Serra on his Drawing  23:52

Richard Serra talking about his Drawing retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art  with Charlie Rose, april 2011 on HBO. Rose is completely out of his depth and verges on insulting with his hopelessly stupid questions however despite the interviewer Serra remains eloquant and inspiring. 

Georgia O'Keeffe an Inspiration

Georgia O'Keeffe (November 15, 1887 - March 6, 1986)

"When you look at an empty canvas you see your whole life looking back at you".

O'Keeffe had the idea she was going to be a painter when she was no more than 12 years old, perhaps it is that shared thought that draws me to her work now. I must admit when i was an art student I dismissed her work as decorative and apolitical. It is not until now, some 25 years later, that I am taking a fresh look at her work. What i see is a beacon of light through which she illuminated her own path. A truly inspirational artist.

“I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.”

An inspiration for many as a major force in the development of modernist visual language in America but perhaps for me more because of her fierce determination and courage to keep going on a path of her own making. Painting takes courage and despite her fears she kept going with a single-minded vision. A vision spanning 70 years in which she painted her own truth in a fusion of abstract and real.

“Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.”

Her intense emotional response to nature touches me directly. I understand when she says "I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for".  In that I find myself comparing her work with the cave paintings of Lascaux or Altamira, paintings on walls in caves made by our ancestors, before language.

Her images speak to me. In the bones she found in the desert, purified by the elements, I find joy and the connectedness of all things. In the flowers I find a harmony in the microcosm of her world. O'Keeffe said of flowers  “If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for a moment.”  To look at an O'Keeffe flower is to be given a window through which to see your own world. In her city-scapes i find our humanity, the monoliths we construct to declare ourselves, made fragile by the simple act of light. In her landscapes i find a wonder of place, of a natural world to which we all belong.

“I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down. I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught - yo accept as true my own thinking”

Words of wisdom for  women painters in particular.

“I think it's so foolish for people to want to be happy. Happy is so momentary--you're happy for an instant and then you start thinking again. Interest is the most important thing in life; happiness is temporary, but interest is continuous.”  Georgia O'Keeffe

Listen to O'Keeffe talking about her work in these brief clips

Documentary A Life in Art (15mins)

Georgia O'Keeffe Talking about her life and work  part 1

Georgia O'Keeffe Talking about her life and work  part 2

Georgia O'Keeffe Talking about her life and work  part 3

Earth Pigments with Pete Ward

I spent a marvelous day with environmental artist Pete Ward who led a small group of artists ( Duncan Hopkins, Francesca Owen, Rachel Ara and Geoff Mead ) in search of pigments in the earth around North Devon. Almost every known mineral and pigment has at some time been found in this area (from north Devon to Exmoor).  These are the colours of ancient artists and they are still in the ground around us.  Pete has been working with these locally found pigments for many years. His paintings, made with the materials he brings back to the studio, are not only stunning to look at they touch something deep down, like a forgotten memory reawakened. Other works are made in situ, ephemeral interventions on land that tread lightly, echoing the marks made by the passages of time, people, animals, forces of nature and beauty around us.

After a day spent with Peter I cannot look at rocks or mud in the same way; rocks need to sucked to see if they yield (mudstone will dissolve in the mouth) because mud is a material for art.

It has been said that artists remind us of what we have lost, and this is certainly true of Peter Ward. He connects us to the very beginning: to the beginning of the earth, to the beginning of art and to the beginning of life.” Sandy Brown, Resurgence magazine. BIDEFORD BLACK [1] is a unique, naturally occurring carbon based mineral, or culm deposit, running alongside seams of high quality anthracite (coal) across North Devon. The deposits were formed over 350 million years ago. According to research, conducted by local geologist Chris Cornford, the mineral is unique in that it only contains the lignum of tree ferns rather than the spores, bark and leaf matter normally associated with coal deposits where the outer layers were removed before being deposited and trapped beneath layers of landslip soil and rock. The deposits were crushed and pushed 8km beneath the earth’s surface as plate tectonics ground and compressed the fine vegetable matter to form the greasy clay deposits we find today. The mineral is made up of flat hexagonal platelets, similar to that of graphite. This structure may have been exaggerated by the shearing and sluicing action of the earth. The mineral consists of roughly equal parts of carbon, silica and alumina – the carbon providing the exceptionally rich black colouration that made it so useful as a pigment. The seams stretch from Hartland and Abbotsham on the coast in a southeasterly direction beneath Bideford and inland as far as Umberleigh. ‘Mineral Black’, or ‘Biddiblack’ as it was also known, was mined for 200 years in Bideford, processed and used commercially as a paint and dye until 1968 when cheaper oil-based pigments became available. As an artists pigment it was sold in the eighteenth century by companies such as Reeves of London who also sold raw umber from Combe Martin and ochre from East Down in their paint boxes. Pete Ward is currently leading a research project on the history and use of Bideford Black as an art material.

[1] http://www.bidefordblackblog.blogspot.co.uk