Structure and Imagery

  David Pollack with paintings from his Harbor series, in his studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Photo: Denise Sfraga Let the Painting Build Itself: An Interview with David Pollack by Paul Behnke Paul Behnke:  Well, let's start at the beginning. Would you talk a little about your background? What set you on the path your work is on? You have gone through several overlapping stages since I've been acquainted with your work. David Pollack:  Growing up my dad was a landscape architect but I think he wanted to be a painter too. He was an amazing draftsman and could draw anything. So, that's where my tree imagery comes from. He used to draw trees all the time and they used to hang in my house. And he actually received a Rome Prize where you go to Rome for a year and they give you a studio set up. PB: That's the prize Philip Guston was awarded. Right? DP: That's what I was about to say. Guston was there when my dad was there. So I was around it as a kid and I tried to draw li...

Philip Guston’s “Head II,” 1969, one of the works in the postponed show. (National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Edward R. Broida) From the Washington Post's art critic, Sebastian Smee In postponing Guston exhibition, the National Gallery and three other museums have made a mistake From the article: "In the art world, the culture war is playing out as a question of how big a role art can and should play in bringing about certain kinds of social change. Many on the left want our idea of art to become so instrumentalist — so subservient to political imperatives — that they are willing to jettison large parts of what art means to people who love it and truly need it. I am referring to its ambiguities, its contradictions, its connection to the richness and freedom of our inner lives, to beauty and pain, and its ability to speak to confusions within and without. I’m talking about all the things you find in Toni Morrison, in Frank Ocean, in Anton Chekhov or Alice Munro, in Sho...

A quote by Charles Dickens, in Philip Guston's hand, tacked to the painter's studio wall.

Philip Guston, Sanctuary , 1944 Four A.M. by Wislawa Szymborska The hour between night and day. The hour between toss and turn. The hour of thirty-year-olds. The hour swept clean for roosters' crowing. The hour when the earth takes back its warm embrace. The hour of cool drafts from extinguished stars. The hour of do-we-vanish-too-without-a-trace. Empty hour. Hollow. Vain. Rock bottom of all the other hours. No one feels fine at four a.m. If ants feel fine at four a.m., we're happy for the ants. And let five a.m. come if we've got to go on living. -from Poems: New and Collected 1957- 1997

Thanks to a generous friend in Memphis and the magic of amazon.com this just jumped to the top of my reading list... Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman w/ Afterword by Frank O'Hara Feldman on Philip Guston..."Then there was Guston. He was the arch crank. Very little pleased  him. Very little satisfied him. Very little was art. Always aware in his own work of the  rhetorical nature of the complication, Guston reduces, reduces, building his own Tower of Babel and then destroying it."