Haunted by Barney

I'm afraid my attention passed him by as well, but I see your point of similarity, at least with his early style - texture in the fields of color. Even the flat yellow has some texture to my cataracted eyes - unlike an "artwork" hung in a small conference room at our downtown office building. Think of a canvas mostly made up of an acrylic square, all of some muddy color. No zip, no texture - just the unvarying paint, solid color - it annoyed me every time I saw it.

Your main picture here is much more interesting - so long as you don't ask me to count the corks, or walnuts - what they are isn't important, just that they are. The photo isn't meant to mean, just to be.

Thank you very much, Bob. I have a whole beehive in my bonnet that's constantly buzzing about the reduction of photos and paintings to text. People like John Berger have much to answer for, I think.

I'm not saying that something like conceptual art is bad. I think Tracey Emin's photo of Monument Valley, for example, is brilliant. But photos and paintings are meant to be looked at as well as interpreted. My beehive started to grow in high school, by the way. I could not see the sense of treating any of Shakespeare's plays as simply an exercise in symbolism, which is the way his plays were taught in Ontario in the 1960s.

I think this works well as an abstract John..............and having checked out your link (for which I thank you) I can see where got your inspiration from. I think there could be a lot of scope on the "zips" theme, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with :-)

Thanks, Keith. I have an old photo of this type I'm going to post tomorrow.

I went to photo school before 10 years for 2 months,it was like a photo club with us there,enthuziasts and our teacher,only thing i remember from those lectures is that horizontal lines means stability,vertical means monumentality and there were also obliquely ones but i forgot what those meant.
Like suprematism and abstract art very much,Rothko,Pollock,Klee,Malevich,Kandinsky etc. and now will also add this guy,saw couple of paintings of him before but didnt know his name,tnx.

That's interesting, Marko. Newman added the zips to make his paintings monumental. And they work. They're also a good source of tension. Hmm. This is giving me a whole new set of ideas about abstract painting, so thanks for the inspiration. I'll be looking up Malevich.

A Canadian painter, Yves Gaucher, did a series of paintings in which he used lines and dots to guide the viewer's eyes:
aci-iac.ca/content/art-books/6/yves-gaucher-hommage-a-webern-2-kw.jpg

Actually, that's a print of sorts, but I'm sure you get the idea.

I can imagine the thrill what they felt when this new art direction was emerging,something new and so minimal but full at the same time,amazing.
Unfortunately we lack this today,its seems like its the end times of art,why for fuck sake there is no A in STEM..?? Art was shaping the world,why they put it aside? It could be STEMA,it works semantically,god knows who deicided that.

The closest thing to something new was this "Vaporwave" genre,in a nut shell its George Michaels Last christmas slow down 800 times.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFxTEV_lbuU

;))

Or it could be STEAM. Or MATES might be better -- an alliance of science and art.

I think a large part of the problem has been that there has been so much unanalytical writing about art.

Excellent work!

Thanks, William.

Admired in:
www.ipernity.com/group/tolerance

I think Mr. Newman would like them!

Thank you very much, Diane.

I like your album. Nice tribute, really, to Barnett Newman.

I'd love to have this one in my group 'm m multiples s s' - if you want.

Thanks, raingirl. I'm sorry I didn't think to submit it to your group before. One of my favourite groups.