Every day for 20 years
I would think: "what am I going to do next?"
That is how I ask for the inspiration.
I don’t have any ideas myself. I have a vacant mind
in order to do exactly what the inspiration calls for.
She would sit in her rocking chair until the idea came into her head and
she called this inspiration. The sort of presentation seemingly automatic of
the image fully formed in her head.
It appeared in her head at a very small scale like a little postage stamp
so when you look at her notebooks you see how she draws the postage
stamp sized picture and then does complicated mathematics to scale it up
to meet the self-defined limitations of her canvas.
I was sitting waiting for an inspiration about innocence
and into my mind there came a grid
with lines going this way and lines going that way
and they were innocent.
They looked like innocence.
Martin said a wonderful thing once when people questioned the paintings.
asking "what are these paintings?". And she said: "From music people accept pure emotion
but from art they demand explanation."
Well these paintings are pure emotion. They are paintings of states of existence,
innocence, happiness,
the sublime…
And we have a
tremendous range of abstract
feelings but we don’t pay any attention to them.
My granddaughter was about 11 years old
and she was in Agnes’s apartment and there was a rose in a vase.
She was mesmerised by the rose and Agnes saw that.
She picked up the rose and said: "Is this rose is beautiful Isabel?"
and Isabel said: “Yes this rose is beautiful”.
Then Martin put the rose behind her back
and she said to Isabel:
"Is the rose still beautiful?”
and Isabel said: “Yes the rose is still beautiful”.
She said: “You see the beauty is not in the rose, the beauty is in your mind”.
I painted for twenty years and I didn’t like the paintings.
They weren’t what I wanted. I wanted
really abstract without any cause in this world, you know?
So every day I painted and I got closer and closer to
abstract painting but it took me 20 years.
I had trouble with that one.
We tend to associate Agnes Martin with the grid but she wasn’t born
a fully-fledged abstract painter and she went through two decades of
incredibly intense experimentation to achieve that moment of perfection.
She was a painter with a long life who painted every single day
and edited out the work she didn’t like. If there was a composition that she achieved
and if it wasn’t quite right she would destroy the picture.
With a mat knife she would cut up her paintings and she would paint that painting again.
And she could paint that painting ten times and destroy nine of them.
Martin was the greatest editor of work
I think of any artist probably who ever lived.
I think about nothing but painting and the older I get
the more I like to paint.
It grows on you.
Just imagine, I am eighty eight so I have been going for quite a while.
I have to sit down.
Looking at these grids and repetitive lines and
passages of pale colour.
Think of them as much of a mantra as a visual experience
and the repetition is like the repetition of the sound and Martin has
felt that the painting is a kind of map and it is a map to your inner responses.
Whether it be joy or happiness or makes you calm...
That’s the work of art, that her painting is a key to the art within you.