Category: Sketchblog

#0750 Lines
Larger Image.

The last abstracts were all with an idea in the back of my mind. Decorative. Taboo. Illustrative, taboo. My current racy enthusiasm for Richard Diebenkorn suffered a moment, a speed bump, when I read the word ‘decorative’ about his art somewhere. His fantastic ocean park works are decorative. If I had the right house they would decorate it well.

So I have been emphasizing the decorative, deliberately confronting my notion, my sense, that being decorative is not on my agenda. I looked at these lines and thought they were quite decorative, but too empty and stark. This led to thinking what if this were a figure? I then returned to some earlier sketches from my life drawing. I made them more decorative? (They are coming up in the next two posts). Id like something with more of this one but with a hint of the nude that is coming up.

Mark Rothko (wikipedia)

“Since my pictures are large, colorful and unframed, and since museum walls are usually immense and formidable, there is the danger that the pictures relate themselves as decorative areas to the walls. This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense, and are the opposite of what is decorative.”