Existing comment:
JOHN MARIN
Despite his strong figurative artistic origins, Gates in the late 1940s and early 1950s was taking a slow turn towards abstraction, even as he questioned the very possibility of abstract visual language. "You can't call it abstract, because it all comes from some experience, some point. of departure in nature." His embrace of abstraction is likely to have been influenced by his teaching.
colleagues at the Phillips. Gallery Art School and then at American University: Karl Knaths, Jack Tworkov, and especially John Marin.
Marin became interested in my watercolors and asked after them from time to time and criticized them for me. I have kept the sketches that he criticized, with his own drawings on the back showing
me how I should have done them. I plan to sell them in my old age and live on the proceeds; they are my Social Security.
The influence of the drawings helped me keep that kind of linear, structural approach I used for so long... The hardest job in painting is to avoid tricks, like copying the use of line in Marin.
Image: John Marin, Taos Canyon, New Mexico, 1929. Watercolor. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dolores and John W. Beck, Winter Park, FL, 2012.58. |