I have many friends asking me about how I became more interested in the desire to write artist statements. While I don't feel that I am truly great at it, I do know a few wonderful artists who are also great writers, and I go from them and eventually found myself in my writing which I hope you will do also.
One of the most important pieces of art writing I have found is the piece below. It was written by an artist most don't know of unless you are really interested in what is called RADICAL PAINTING. It's also called Concrete Painting, or Color Based Painting. There are so many names. But what is important is the painter and their paintings. This wonderful gent was known on earth as Frederic Matys Thursz. One of the main things that gets me so hooked on this essay is how your mind immediately finds yourself in Leger's studio looking around as he did. It's very visual writing and it really got me more interested in finding writers that took on the task of writing about art in this way and not the typical jargon.
A few links to help you learn about this artist.
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/10/obituaries/frederic-matys-thursz-abstract-painter-62.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Matys_Thursz
https://www.artsy.net/show/jeff-lincoln-art-plus-design-frederic-matys-thursz-the-light-within-the-late-work-1980-1992#!
Please open these images up and save them to your hard drive or you can open them in a new tab and read them that way. Unless you've got super good eyes and can just read em here like this.
Thursz has a longstanding place in my mind since the first time I walked into Jan Maiden Fine Art in Columbus Ohio. The newspaper here, The Columbus Dispatch the week before did a big story about this exhibition in their Arts section. And having been a big Rothko and Color Painting fan, when I saw this review I knew it had something for me. When you walk through the door the first painting you are confronted with was a big Thursz in a wonderful shade of violet. Thankfully there were two paintings by Thursz in the exhibition, if only I had won the lotto during that show I would have bought both of his paintings. Along with half the rest of the show. The exhibition was called Color-Based Paining (The Root of the Actual) and as I later found out was curated by Joseph Marioni who tended to curate a number of shows but never put on the marquee that it was curated by him. I liked that idea. It also exhibited a number of first time Ohio showings for most of the included. Peter Tollens, Rudolf de Crignis, Ingo Meller, Phil Sims, Ulrich Wellmann and Joseph Hughes. The Marioni paintings were kind of the star of the show since he was included at a big solo exhibition of his at the Columbus Museum of Art. They did a marvelous exhibition of his there that I still kick myself for not visiting more. Heck I went to this gallery each weekend it was up for a couple hours. Most people spend 10-15 minutes in a gallery. I was spending 2+ hours each Saturday. By doing so I got to meet a few other fans too and even got to hear the owner turn down a sale of some kid whose parents were going to buy him an $18,000 painting for his investment. I thought that was funny and sad at the same time, cause I sure wasn't able to do things like that. I certainly wished I could. But I ended up spending many days and weeks hanging out with The Painter at his homes, which was wonderful.
After the first 30 minutes of being in the gallery, I had barely got past the third painting in the show which belonged to de Crignis, a wonderful monochrome painter from Switzerland who had developed a style of layering glazes after glazes to create a surface painting that truly had a glow unto it. As I was investigating it, Jan's husband came into the gallery, said hello and immediately engaged into a conversation with me about these. He had such a funny story about de Crignis, he said in all his years of visiting artist studios, he never was in a studio so clean as Rudolf's. He laughed and said it was spotless, so much so that you'd have no problem sitting on the floor without repercussion that you'd end up with paint on your clothes.
I haven't mentioned the Thursz paintings in the gallery. I should since they had such an effect and affect on me and my painting as it was developing. The thing that I had never seen before or since in painting was that he would add a second layer of linen to an already painted linen surface, just slathering on the vermillion or whatever color he chose. So when you looked at the painting you saw the whole and then as you began to intently survey the surface you noticed there was a second layer of linen attached to the original stretched linen. It gave the painting a whole new surface (as how I saw it that day) and like how great painting affects you, I went home that day and began chopping up pieces of canvas to stick onto my new painting I had decided to make.
The white stripes on the black canvas ground are what I ended up doing. Except I glued mine down and didn't slather the back with glue so they curled up on the edges. If you saw them and still knew about Thursz you probably wouldn't think that was where I got the idea from. But it was.
In the back of the gallery was a table where you could read about the artists in the exhibition. Thankfully she had the two catalogs by
Galerie Lelong in NYC on Thursz. I believe they might still have a few copies if you are so inclined. I got them for myself later, but the thing that made me really wish to acquire them was the writings in the back that he would do. I never had read such wonderful writing on painting, it was almost poetry in my mind. I'll see if I can find the other piece but you might have to go buy the books to find that one too.
