When an artist has a block or dry spell.
When this happens to me I read Herman Melville and consider Frank Stella's "Moby Dick". On the afternoon of Dec. 1, 1850 Melville wrote how for millions of years whales had been filling the atmosphere over the waters of the Pacific with the haze of their spouts-"sprinkling and mystifying the the gardens of the deep". it was then that he made note of the exact time and date when he was writing these words: "fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o'clock pm of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1850". what a moment for the artist! What an opportunity for creativity! The Modernist concept of the self-conscious hand of the artist in full bloom and connected to that exquisite sentence of prose about the "...gardens of of the deep."
One hundred and forty years later Frank Stella took this language/concept and constructed 135 sculpture /paintings from this amazing book; one for each chapter. This brilliant sense of self and material is the true key to Modernist art as well as its biggest difficulty. How to record the moment of creation and depict some profound aspect of the world simultaneously.
Next week try working from a piece of writing that inspires you.
see you then. john.
No comments:
Post a Comment