Loving Ms. Martin

White Flower

We blog about Shaker simplicity, our beloved New England coastal palatte, quiet landscapes, modernist and brutalist architecture, etc. When we interact with an Agnes Martin painting, we see the sum total of these passions: all are implied. Reading a Richard Serra interview about drawing and representation a few years ago, the net takeaway was that any mark we make as humans is organic, figurative--no matter what the intent. Agnes Martin's attempt to create absolute abstractions bereft of any representation has an ironic beauty, since she used no tools to erase the evidence of hand. The result are lines that amount to nothing and everything, geometries that are absolutely organic.

The Dark River (detail)

The Dark River

Wood 1

Untitled (No. 5)

Untitled, 1963

Series of 20 screenprints

Tremolo

Untitled, 1961

Untitled (No. 3), 1984

Untitled (No.3), 1984 (detail)

Starlight