Agnes Martin’s Arms – a note/poem

She takes short sharp breaths and makes an odd humming sound, occasionally shifting her teeth.

She wears blouses of complimentary coloured horizontals…

remember this film was made of over four years…she was ninety when it was finished.

She is aged, monumental, slow moving, creased and patterned, there is a rock’s solidity about her, discipline (which she talks of movingly – her mother was a disciplinarian) doggedness but also something wide open and spacious, ephemeral and ever changing.

 

I’m not sure now if it was her paintings…the mood and tone of them, or reading about her that first pulled me in…but she does.

 

Trying to respond to the interviewer but obviously more interested in painting her latest vision.

So where does all this begin…in Sakatchewan with the plains and the long trains, in painting paintings for 20 years that weren’t right…?

Or in the visions and inspirations?

 

She is a loner…but happy she says…small happy…you can’t paint if you have people around – you need quiet and solitude.

 

She moves slowly…likes to apply her own gesso…using maybe a three inch paint brush….she says she always used to work on six foot by six foot – human size so folk could walk into the painting…she struggles with that and has reduced it down to five foot.

 

Her arms…big and strong like a washerwoman, or a fishwife…arms that could give you a powerful hug…if she wanted to. Her movement is knowing…and gradual, thorough…so many times doing this repetitive action.

 

Of any line she prefers the horizontal….she knows this is how it can be…you can step in over the horizontals into the space of the painting.

Her colours are pale and muted almost pastel, but vibrant.

She never paints a square –

doesn’t like squares

They are aggressive and too tight and rational

She prefers a rectangle – more soft and open

she can tell if a person is a square or a rectangle.

Though she spends a lot of time in calculations for the drawing out of horizontal lines. She shows us a table top full of measurements and calculations for correct spacing – says she was never much good at mental arithmetic.

She is more concerned to clear her mind of clutter

‘if your minds full of garbage, if the inspiration came – you wouldn’t recognize it anyway.’

She talks of waiting for a vision to come of asking the question ‘what should I paint?

The longest she waited is five months.

And then the painting appears in your mind and you paint.

 

Can she tell more about tranquillity?

She’s busy with painting ….’hmm hmm but I think I’d better paint….you can see I’m a pretty speedy painter. You have to be in this climate…it’s a very dry climate.’

 

‘It’s very hard to quiet the mind – you have to go slower and slower and then…stop. Then your mind is at rest….You have to not try too hard…Best way …just look around…just keep in the mood for truth…it’s a happy state of mind….just very small happiness.’

Oh Agnes…this we share.

‘Stay alert and it comes into your mind what to do. Getting rid of intellect and noise…settling into being and silence waiting for inspirations and the vision to come.’

And here I am struggling to read notes, taken from the documentary, typing, trying to shape it…maybe being more a square than a rectangle…but what she is saying gets to my own truth – it’s good to hear you Agnes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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