A month or so back in a post, I wrote about the late Modernist painter Oscar Bluemner and the odd feeling of connection I felt to his work. There was something in it that seemed beyond familiar and that really intrigued me, making me want to find out more about this little known painter. I found one book, Oscar Bluemner: A Passion for Color, written by Barbara Haskell , the curator for a Bluemner retrospective of the same title at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in 2005.
When it arrived yesterday I opened the package and flipped through it quickly, taking in the images that all seemed so right to me. Stopping on a page of print, the first sentence I read surprised me and made this feeling of connection with Bluemner seem even more palpable.
Bluemner considered subject matter irrelevant except as a conduit through which to convey his moods and inner consciousness, yet he also believed that art must be based on the real world in order for it to communicate with viewers.
That sentence succinctly captures much of what I try to convey about my work when I stumble through my writtten explanations. Looking further I came across pieces of his that so meshed with my own work, particularly in my earlier phases, that it was eerie. The colors and forms and even the sense of rhythm seemed so close. Even the words he chose when writing about his work seemed to mirror my own. He spoke of that same rhythm to which I often refer. The words continuum and polarity seem to pop up frequently as well as I glimpsed through, both words that draw my antennae.
I begin to wonder about he connection. Perhaps it is inevitable in this wide world of ours that two widely separated minds would view thie world in the same spatial way and would emply the same colors and forms and rhythms, would try to communicate may of the same emotions and perceptions. Perhaps we all have these creative doubles, our artistic doppelgangers, and the only exceptional thing is that I may have come across such a person and recognize it.
I don’t know. I have yet to read deeper into this treatise and may come across something that will make me deeply regret connecting my work in any way with his. Judging from his life and death, he was obviously deeply flawed. I hope that my own many flaws do not match too well with those of Bluemner.
We’ll see.
Redtree Times 