Showing posts with label States of Feeling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label States of Feeling. Show all posts

14/03/2014

States of Feeling at Hillsboro Fine Art


On the last day of August 2012, Carol and I went into town to see States of Feeling at Hillsboro Fine Art which included late paintings by Robert Motherwell and recent paintings by Gary Komarin and Larry Poons. Although I regarded Motherwell as the most significant of the three painters, his late work on show was mostly a minor reworking on a small scale his early abstract imagery. These small, late Motherwell’s were turgid and uninspiring - unlike his earlier signature works - though they played with similar amorphous, torso like shapes. The Komarin paintings were a revelation to me, since I had never heard of him or see his any of work. Though I detected echoes of Richard Diebenkorn, the Komarin paintings lacked any significant originality of form or style. Still, I found his deceptively simplified abstractions with dusty colours and splashy shapes very evocative.                                                                                           
However, it was Larry Poons paintings that left the strongest impression on me. Poons was a survivor of the vagaries of art world fashion that had briefly held him up as a major painter in the early 1960s but had slowly turned away from him as abstract painting’s dominance was challenged and then overthrown by Pop, installations, video and performance art. As young artist Poons’ hero was Mondrian and he consciously avoided the legacy of de Kooning that had turned so many weaker talents into pasticher’s of de Koonings hooked dynamic brushstrokes. Yet, despite his early fascination with geometric abstraction, Poons had later became one of the most energetic revitalizer’s of expressive abstraction. Over a sixty year career, Poons abstract painting had progressed from Geometric to Op-Art, to Post-Painterly Abstraction and in his last years a more expressive style that hinted at figurative elements. A good friend of Jules Olitski, in the late 1960s he had turned away from the more planned and structured abstract work that had initially made his reputation, to produce more spontaneous free form canvases in which he poured paint in rivulets down the canvas and then cropped them where appropriate. Yet, such canvases that often looked like abstract variations of Monet’s late water lily canvases were derided as mere backgrounds by many.                                                                                                       
  
I appreciated the free paint handling and form making Poons had arrived at after a lifetime of devotion to abstraction. His broken line and shimmering, scintillating colour reminded me of late Bonnard. I had thought they would be in oils, so I was surprised to find they were in acrylic often manipulated with his hands. Poons’ colour was electric and his handling of paint full of feeling. I thought they were some of the most exquisitely beautiful abstracts I had seen in years. Poons work made me want to get back to painting - the highest compliment I could possibly give. We topped off the day with a meal in KFC and a rummage around the art books in Chapters and Easons.