Untitled #5
Agnes Martin
AGNES MARTIN, 1998. ACRYLIC PAINT AND GRAPHITE ON CANVAS
Agnes Martin waited for her paintings to come to her. Sat in a rocking chair, often for weeks on end, she patiently anticipated the visions that would bring structure to her canvases. Deceptively simple, Martin’s paintings were acts of laborious love. Each began as a sketch the size of a postage stamp. She would then use complicated mathematics, enormous rulers, tape and a pencil to scale them onto the six foot square canvases she worked with. Yet for all the rigor and pain their construction brought, the paintings are about the simplest things in life. Love, beauty, happiness – Martin’s experience of these emotions was radically simple and she wanted to translate this to a visual language. The resulting images are so soft, so gentle, that reproduction does them no justice. Spending time in front of her work is like taking in a breath of air, weightless but satiating. In their subtlety they speak to the joys of being human, the quiet and profound pleasure of living.