I saw the most remarkable show Sunday in Los Angeles: James Turrell's retrospective at LACMA. There has been a lot written about this, including a New York Times cover article the same day, but all I can write about is my own reaction. Entering St. Elmo's Breath I felt like I was walking into death. The room had no walls: the light was gray and suffused, with a shimmering white light at the end of the room. Figures disappeared into the light. I am, admittedly, emotionally vulnerable, thinking immediately of my mother and Dan, so I started weeping and couldn't stop. but what Turrell has done is truly visionary, a way to shake up our way of being in the world. Other installations open at the Guggenheimm in NYC next week. The Los Angeles show runs through April.
Why this- why now?
At a recent opening of my show in Rochester, one relatively sophisticated viewer pointed out that some of the paintings looked like they were by different people. The organic, textured, flowing, hot colored abstract landscape next to three muted, resin coated circles and dots bothered him. Tenerife. 36x72 Specimens 30x30 Not me, though. Having come to painting late, I insisted on spending a few years going through many stages of representational rendering- flowers, fish, fruit, figures- and that’s just the ‘f’s- to prove to myself that I could. When I decided I had captured clouds and sunrises and the sea, I got rid of the horizon line- and I was painting abstractly, which had been my goal all along. Rather than experiment in style pastiche or stages I think I paint in paragraphs. A new idea emerges, it gets done again, different iterations, then I revisit what I had thought was finished. When this essay is finished, I move on. Mark Rothko ...
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