Joan Miró . The Blue Series
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Vital Stats
- troy.
- Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, United States
- Creative type. Mixed media on Earth. Learning to breathe.
4 comments:
Miro describes the preparation for the three Blue paintings:
"The very last works are the three large blue canvases. They took me a long time. Not to paint, but to think them through. It took an enormous effort on my part, a very great inner tension to reach the emptiness I wanted. The preliminary stage was intellectual. . . . It was like preparing the celebration of a religious rite or entering a monastery. Do you know how Japanese archers prepare for competitions? They begin by getting themselves into the right state, exhaling, inhaling, exhaling. It was the same thing for me. I knew that I had everything to lose. One weakness, one mistake, and everything would collapse."
"I began by drawing them in charcoal, very precisely. (I always start work very early in the morning.) In the afternoon, I would simply look at what I had drawn. For the rest of the day, I would prepare myself internally. And finally, I began to paint: first the background, all blue, but it was not simply a matter of applying color like a house painter: all the movements of the brush, the wrist, the breathing of the hand-all these things played a role. 'Perfecting' the background put me in the right state to go on with the rest. This struggle exhausted me. I have not painted anything since. These canvases are the culmination of everything I have tried to do up to then."
Hey Troy, thanks for the tip to check this out. The Miro paintings are beautiful, and his comments make them better. The best thing about them is the space, the depth of a single solid color. I know what he means about preparing. Art, like any worthwhile work we do, can fail miserably, and I think that fear is what keeps our focus taut and adrenaline flowing, and from that comes our best work, though we barely know it at the time. There is a line I love from CS Lewis's "Till We Have Faces". The main character prepares to write a book and she says she is with book, like a woman is with child. We are given the vision or the idea, from somewhere outside of ourselves and then we just give birth to it that best that we can. And then at the end we look at the finished work with wonder, hardly believing it was our own hands that did it. I think that might be God working through us, and I think this apply's to much more than art.
Your insight Joanna that it applies to so much more than art is relevent to the refining that God desires to accomplish in our lives. And that we are a masterpiece created by the loving hand of God. I do not ever want to lose sight of the wonder that God creates in our lives.
Thanks for the link to your blog. Great art. I have been so busy looking at photographs I have almost no time to remember to look at the abstract fine art I love so much. I look forward to seeing your stuff as well. Much love.
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