Quote from: FinallyMichelle on February 18, 2018, 01:36:39 AM
I am so glad that you put Rothko there. 😊 I kinda see Reinhardt as a Fortune 500 company lobby to Rothko as your favorite aunts living room. Efficiency vs warmth. I don't know why the one artist always makes me think of the other.
You are going in the right direction. No one wants to end up a Basquiat.
I hope. 😊
I love Basquiat! Of course you're right, I wouldn't want to
be a Basquiat...
My grandmother has always said that she felt DeKooning hated women, and judging by how well his work captures what it feels like to be "stuck in a woman's body" when you are anything but, I definitely feel there's a kernel of truth to that. (Never liked his work enough to find out what the art historians thought.) He perfectly captures the fake smile, the ugliness I see in my own curves, and the thousand-mile stare of someone forced into mimicry and trying to check out.
Reinhardt captures the uneasy peace of dissociation for me. The cold, calculating sense of being sucked up into your head and forgetting, for a moment, that you even
have a body. Not a good place to be indefinitely, but it works in the interim. Moreover, it also hints at a sense of pride - the verticality suggests squaring your shoulders and keeping your chin up in spite of wanting to be anywhere but here.
Klee represents learning to come out of that emotionless sense of order and learning to piece together actual things from the dissociation again. Here it's the suggestion of an environment or city - I'm not quite at the point where I'm comfortable with figures and bodies, mine still confounds me - a kind of organic take on the same grid theme emergent from the color fields. It's relearning to be OK with the unevenness, the quirks of being human, trans or not.
I'll always have that headspace, though, but hopefully it will in the future be much more emotionally adept, like a Rothko; and at the same time I hope to wind up with a body easier for me to acknowledge, easier for me to celebrate and move with, and to appreciate all the little fun, and sometimes grimy, oddnesses of material existence a la Shiele.
Really, though, I've always loved abstract expressionism and color fields. More than anything else I've felt that Rothko and others like him have been able to paint emotions as if they were places you could visit, walk through, and stand in.