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| Woman in front of Mirror Pablo Picasso, Oil. |
Picasso's teacher growing up was his father and like a father/son relationship he questioned his father's methods and guidelines in search of his way, along with events in his youth like the tragic loss of his 7 yr old sister to diphtheria he went on to became one of the best known artists of all time; and it's these sort of yearnings and events in one's life which makes them great, something all mankind has in common one way or another.
yes, events in an artist's life shape the "tabula rasa" or blank slate one looks at: the canvas. I almost never hear of an artist having "painters" block, "artists' block" there are so many who have writer's block but here in facing the tabula rasa, a different calling- up of fragmented reality, sets of perception in memory and the reaction to the memory one posseses. Then shapes and color, line, come through. For artists, there are enough "starter" experiences in studio habits, : making small drawings, calling upon the vast treasury of figurative, symbolic patterns, memnotic perceptions, ellipsis. Gottlieb, an abstract artist, like Pollock, gravitated to, was influenced by the almost prehensile meanderings and symbolic talisman markings in oceanic art and in african art . There is a sense of rebirth: images catylcysmic as in "stellar" and at the same time referential to cellular structure
ReplyDeletein Oceanic art. it was as if the artist of Oceania knew the sea was the conveyor of all tribal symbiosis
and of course it was. Pollock's genius was to make early paintings that assimilated early oceanic and african art to such a degree that in viewing his early works, one is immediately aware of his unique ability to infuse the oceanic and african images with his own alphabet, his own pictorial language emerging as he worked on each canvas. This is the studio process at its finest example.and it is the studio process that calls forth continual rebirth and artistic excellence.
I agree 'tabula rasa'; a term I first became familiar with through studying psychology and human developement, then I was re-introduced to it in a course on Aristotle where it made even more sense as this was as close to its origin one can get. As a fan of Aristotle, studying him was a 'clear slate' in of itself as far as western thought goes; I believe the correlation makes most sense in visual art as it is self evident mostly through abstract as it is the artists own' language' their own innate yearnings and method of communication/behavior/character. Abstract art also allows the artist to act more freely through visual means because there are less rules to follow, such as proper sentence structure etc in poetics and such; almost as if a new language altogether is created from nothing.
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