The Rebellious Curator

This is the original painting as I first painted it. I wanted to depict spring blossoms on a tree. Baker was secondary subject and strictly from memory. After a few years, I felt the painting was weak and lacked depth. 

So I made the changes and transformed the tree and surrounding area into Fall. 

I rarely if ever use reference photos so this was completely from my own imagination. 

I would love to know which is your favourite.

Much of Twombly's work is a direct reflection of his response to Greek and Roman mythology and contemporary graffiti. His gestural drawing and painting technique is extremely hard to replicate.

"One could say that any child could make a drawing like Twombly, only in the sense that any fool with a hammer could fragment sculptures like Rodin, or any house painter could splatter paint as well as Pollock. In none of these cases would it be true. In each case, the art lies not so much in the finesse of each individual mark, but in the orchestration of a previously uncodified set of personal rules about where to act, and where not, how far to go, and when to stop. In such a way as the cumulative courtship of seeming chaos defines an original hybrid kind of order which in turn, illuminates a complex sense of human experience not voiced or left marginal in previous art." 

 Kirk Varnedoe - Chief Curator, MOMA, and Professor of Art History, Princeton U.

"Creating artwork allows your mind to be in a safe place while it contemplates the tougher issues you are dealing with. 

One can use the tools of a brush, paint, pastels,crayons, etc. to expose, and even for a short time, colour those issues in a different light." - George E. Miller

"The landscapes were in my arms as I did it." - Helen Frankenthaler

"When I was a younger man, art was a lonely thing. No galleries, no collectors, no critics, no money. Yet it was a golden age, for we all had nothing to lose, and a vision to gain. Today it is not quite the same. It is a time of tons of verbiage, activity, consumption. Which condition is better for the world I shall not venture to discuss. But I do know that many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow. We must all hope to find them."

Mark Rothko

"The more frightening the world becomes, the more art becomes abstract."

Wassily Kandinsky

"I cross out words so you will see them more." 

Jean Michel Basquiat

Poet Apollinaire defined pure abstraction like this:

"The art of painting new structures out of elements that have not been borrowed from the visual sphere, but have been created entirely by the artist is pure art."

Painting by Jack Bush

Early Morning in Fort Langley Cemetery - Late Fall 2021