Monet's Pond

Claude Monet   Water-Lily Pond   1926

“For the pond [in Monet’s garden] was as artificial as painting itself. It was flat, as a painting is. What showed on its surface, the clouds and lilypads and cat's-paws of wind, the dark patches of reflected foliage, the abysses of dark blue and the opaline shimmer of light from the sky, were all compressed together in a shallow space, a skin, like the space of painting. The willows touched it like brushes. No foreground, no background; instead, a web of connections. Monet's vision of energy manifesting itself in a continuous field of nuances would be of great importance to abstract painting thirty years after his death. A work like Jackson Pollock's Lavender Mist, 1950, with its palpitation of paint-skeins knitted across the whole canvas, is an American prolongation of the Symbolist line that runs through Monet's garden. But even if they had had no echoes in future painting, some of the Waterlilies would still be among the supreme moments of vision in Western art. The pond was a slice of infinity. To seize the indefinite; to fix what is unstable; to give form and location to sights so evanescent and complex that they could hardly be named -- these were basic ambitions of modernism, and they went against the smug view of determined reality that materialism and positivism give us."

                             

                                                     Robert Hughes   from The Shock of The New

Patrick Michael Fitzgerald

Patrick Michael Fitzgerald  Tree (andratx)   2009

“My working process is quite organic and I like the materiality and directness of painting. Each painting is a kind of entity or body; they are layered and grow in unexpected ways; they are meshed and woven together using different painterly components, small gestures and marks, threads and lines, swathes and bands. I like the idea of cultivation and gardens and the paintings often refer to these directly or indirectly. Obviously, colour, light and form are essential elements in my work but also the qualities of surface, tactility and touch are very important too. I have come to understand that painting is as much about energy as anything else, nothing is really solid and finally formed.”

                                                                Patrick Michael Fitzgerald    

 

 

Richard Rorty

Micky Donnelly  Untitled #4  2011  Oil on Fabric on Canvas

Richard Rorty, in his book ‘Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity', argues very persuasively that all vocabularies which purport to describe our world are contingent and therefore open to re-adjustment. He says that people who become aware of this contingency can be called ‘ironists’ in that they treat all ‘final’ (i.e. closed and conclusive) descriptions of the world with equal caution, no matter how solid and agreeable some appear to be.

In other words, every accepted description of our world -- religious, artistic, ideological, philosophical, and scientific -- is never completely trustworthy and is open to question.

An acceptance of Rorty’s position, which is itself contingent, activates all kinds of freedoms for us to continuously re-assess our most closely held values, and to reject, re-arrange, or at least challenge, our assumed hierarchies of meaning and our most ingrained notions of reality.

Amy Sillman

Amy Sillman   Bed   2006

“Painting is a physical thinking process to continue an interior dialogue, a way to engage in a kind of internal discourse, or sub-linguistic mumbling…”

                                                                   Amy Sillman

Dave Hickey

Micky Donnelly  Untitled #14  2011  Oil on Fabric on Wood

 

                                 “The meaning of a sign is the response to it.”

                                                                     Dave Hickey

Philip Guston

Philip Guston  Red Sea  1975

“The spatial dynamics of Guston's paintings are elemental and organic in their permutations. Usually the scene is set by a simple horizontal division of the canvas, each half dominated by a single hue—most often blue or black opposite red or roseate grays—and the resulting space is almost closed off by the density of pigment and color. Although Guston's paintings, like Rothko's late work, are frontal and expansive in design, their atmosphere is, by contrast, heavy and airless. Emphatically earth-bound, they instill claustrophobia rather than intimate transcen­dence. Their topography consists of barren embankments that press forward like landslides against the picture plane, encroaching upon the viewer's space while seeming to forbid any escape for the figures that languish half-embedded in them. Thus, Guston's work recalls the somber, denuded landscapes of Goya's Black Paintings.”

                                                                                                  Robert Storr