References

Ending space - dr. Tomaž Brejc
The time which I belong to - Mateja Sever
The sublime and romanticism in contemporary Slovene painting - Andrej Medved
A hole in time - Barbara Sterle Vurnik
Somewhere in time - Maja Megla
Artists about art : Lee Krassner
Artists about art : Georgia O'Keefe
Artists about art : Agnes Martin
Artists about art : Louise Nevelson
Artists about art : Auguste Rodin

Artists about art : Georgia O'Keefe

»I'm taking my privilege to define myself only through and with painting.
Painting is also an experiment. The result is already in feeling good when you're doing it.«

»A flower is relatively small. Everyone has many associations with a flower – the idea of flowers. Still – in a way – nobody sees the flower – really – it is so small – we haven't time – and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time… So, I said to myself – I'l paint what I see – what the flower is to me - but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it.«
»White flower with the golden heart is something  I have to say about White – quite diffenrent from what White has been meaning to me. Whether the flower or the color is the focus I do not know. I do know that the flower is painted large to convey to you my experience of the flower – and what is my experience of the flower if it is not color… Color is one of the greatest things in the world that makes life worth living to me and as I have come to think of painting, it is my effort to create an equivalent with paint color for the world – life as I see it.«

»Then when I paint the red hill, you say it's too bad that I don't always paint flowers. A flower touches almost everyone's heart. A red hill doesn't touch everyone's heart as it touches mine, and I suppose there is no reason why it should. The red hill is a piece of the badlands where even the grass is gone. Badlands role away outside my door – hill after hill – out there. You have no associations with those hills – our waste land – I think our most beautiful country. You must not have seen it, so you want me always to paint flowers…«

»I was an outsider. My color and form were not acceptable. It had nothing to do with Cezanne or anyone else. I didn't understand what they were talking about… Years later when I finally got to Ceaznne's Mont Sainte-Victoire, I remember sitting there, thinking how could they attach all those analytical remarks to anything he did with that mountain? All those words pilled up on top of that poor little mountain seemed too much.«

»I had things in my head that were not like what anyone has taught me – shapes and ideas so near to me – so natural to my  way of being and thinking that it hasn't occured to me to put them down. I decided to start anew – to strip away what I had been taught – and to accept as true my own thinking…«

»There are people who have made me see shapes – and others I thought of a great deal, even people I have loved, who made me see nothing. I have painted portraits that to me were almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed in to the world as abstractions – no one seeing what they are.«
(See the parallels in the quotations of Lee Krasner:
»My painting is so autobiographical, if anyone can take the trouble to read it.«)

»Eyes can see shapes. It's as if my mind creates shapes that I don't know about. I get the shape in my head. And sometimes I know where it comes from and sometimes I don't.
But I know for sure that one's form is inevitable. One can't even think of failure…«

»Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or a tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they say something. For me that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint.«
(See the prallels in the quotations of Lee Krasner:
»I beleive those lines. I experienced it. I identified with it… How much more reality do you want? Those lines have to do with reality – not lies…«)

»Nothing is less real than realism. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things…«

»I was the sort of child that ate around the raisin on the cookie and ate around the hole in the doughnut, saving either the raisin or the hole for the last and the best.
So probably – not having changed much – when I started painting the pelvis bones I was most interested in the holes in the bones – what I saw through them – the blue from holding them up in the sun against the sky as one is apt to do when one seems to have more sky than earth in one's world… They were most beautiful against the Blue – that Blue that will always be there as it is now after all man's destruction is finished…«

»The rocks seem to have become a symbol to me – of the wideness and wonder of the sky and the world. They have lain there for a long time with the sun and wind, and the blowing sand made them into something that is precious to the eye and hand, to find with excitement, to treasure and love.«

»I have picked flowers where I found them – have picked up shells and rocks and pieces of wood where there were sea shells and rocks and pieces of wood that I liked… When I found the beautiful white bones on the desert I picked them up and took them home, too…
I have used all these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it.«

»When I stand alone with the earth and sky, a feeling of something in me going off in every direction into the unknown of infinity means more to me than anything any organized religion gives me.«
»There's this inexplainable thing in nature that makes me feel the world is big far beyond my understanding – I try to understand it by trying to put it into a form; to find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line or just over the next hill…«

»I feel that a real living form is the natural result of the individual's effort to create the living thing out of the adventure of his spirit into the unknown – where it has experienced something – felt something – it has not understood – and from that experience comes the desire to make the unknown known. By unknown I mean the thing that means so much to the person that he wants to put it down – to clarify something he feels but does not clearly understand. I some way feel that everyone is born with it clear, but that with most of humanity it becomes blasted – one way or another…«

»I have been very fortunate; much more fortunate than most people. I don't know. I could've been much better painter and nobody wouldn't  pay any attention.. But it happened that the things that I was doing have been in touch with my time. I could've been much better as a painter – you see, a painter is one thing, and a person in a way is another thing…«

»On this edge of the knife I might fall off either side, but I'd walk it again – so what – I'd rather be doing something that I really wanted to do.«

 

Links

www.ljnovice.com/galerija/sever-mateja
www.dlul-drustvo.si
www.equrna.si
www.plesnicar.si
www.zigaokorn.info
www.arven.org
www.kiki.si
www.ljudmila.org/stripcore/damjan
www.kapelica.org
www.galerija.skuc-drustvo.si
www.aluo.uni-lj.si
www.zveza-dslu.si
www.ljubljana.si
www.katrin-gruentzig.ch

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