A beautiful mind

AGNES Bernice Martin was an American summary painter born on March 22, 1912 in Macklin, Saskatchewan, Canada. Her work has been outlined as an “essay in discretion on inward-ness and silence”. Although she is commonly thought of or known as a minimalist, Martin thought of herself an summary expressionist.

She as soon as stated: “To be an artist, you look, you perceive, you recognise what is going through your mind. And it is not ideas. Everything you feel and everything you see and everything that your whole life goes through your mind, but you have to recognize it, go with it and really feel it.”

Martin stated that she believes in at all times dwelling in happiness and love, and by no means going for something lesser.

Despite her largely solitary day by day life, Martin shared her distinctive standpoint in quite a few interviews and lectures over the past 4 a long time of her profession. In them, she persistently advocated for an unburdened life and the pursuit of an expertise of perfection and wonder that outcomes solely from a deep state of self-awareness.

Instead of pondering that social understanding will lead us to the reality, Martin believed in any other case. “It is understanding yourself. And to start on that, you have to look in your mind and see what you are thinking about. Because the truth is, you are unconscious of your own thoughts until you catch yourself.”

As an artist, Martin at all times advocated being intentional with each portray. “You can’t be in an unconscious state and paint. Because whatever is in your mind, and not the subject matter, but the feelings that you have related to that subject matter, is what you’re going to paint. So, the beginning is not actually painting. The beginning of painting is not you putting down green, and then thinking you like pink, so you put down pink. Painting’s not about that anymore than music is about this sound and that sound. It’s a whole thing. It’s something you can’t resist representing. It’s something that drives you to expression, and it’s irresistible.”

Martin left New York City abruptly in 1967, disappearing from the artwork world to dwell alone. After eighteen months on the street tenting throughout each Canada and the western United States, Martin settled in Mesa Portales, a distant mesa exterior of the small city of Cuba, New Mexico. In 1974 and 1976, Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield recorded two conversations together with her there. In these excerpts, Martin mentioned the idea of reality, the duties of the artist, dealing with failure, and the significance of understanding one’s personal mind.

“To be an artist, you look, you perceive, you recognise what is going through your mind. And it is not ideas. Everything you feel and everything you see and everything that your whole life goes through your mind, you know. But you have to recognise it and go with it.”

Towards the tip of her life, Martin turned happier and extra social and moved right into a retirement neighborhood in Taos, New Mexico in 1992. During that, she drove a spotless white BMW, one of many few extravagances in a life nonetheless devoted to excessive materials simplicity, to her studio every day.

For Martin, artists want to concentrate on the inspiration that comes and go. “It changes our expression. The best thing about it is that it tells us the next thing to do. Without it, we feel lost. We think, oh, what shall I do and what shall I do, and why was I ever born and everything. But the thing is that not only in artwork but in life itself, we wait in readiness and with patience for the next step in awareness of truth. Of reality. The revelation of truth is the process of life. When you get distracted with this and that, and people say, look at this, and look at that, and you’re looking every way. And you’re spreading yourself out, and you allow people to distract your mind entirely, you will soon feel as though you’re terribly lost and frustrated.”

“Because you have left the process of the revelation of truth, or the seeking of truth, or whatever you want to call it. You have left the path of life. It isn’t the mysterious thing that people make it out to be, the path. You have to find out what your reaction to life is. When you find out about yourself and your reaction to life, then you will know the truth.”

In 1994, the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, a part of the University of New Mexico, introduced that it might renovate its Pueblo-revival constructing and dedicate one wing to Martin’s work. The gallery was designed in line with the artist’s needs to accommodate Martin’s present of seven massive untitled work made between 1993 and 1994.

“The artist has to have an absolute awareness of what he does. If you’re desperate and your inspiration is not coming through, then you probably will fall back on the illustration of an idea.”

“It all comes from attempting to illustrate from an idea instead of the experience coming right through. Now the way to have the experience come right through is that you simply have to be able to clear your mind so it can get through.”

Like so many mystics earlier than her whose quest has been the pursuit of discovering the reply to essentially the most basic query of all existence, Martin confronted the all-pervasive worry inherent throughout the human psyche and transmuted it into a private consciousness of being, a poetic passage of beautiful color on the trail to the edge of the elegant.

“Anger, all the passions, they’re not real. They are what I call the exhaustibles. All the exhaustible things, like anger, you know how quickly it passes. Even the sense of seeing beauty is a very exhaustible thing, seeing it with your eye. If you see something that looks very, very beautiful, but if you kept your eye on that and looked and looked and looked, the beauty would disappear from it, because the eye is exhaustible. But then the inexhaustibles, they’re within the mind, you see. And the beauty that you see within the mind, it really never disappears. Now the inexhaustibles, they go on forever, that’s reality. They go on without change. But anything that is exhaustible is not real.”

Her closing days in December 2004, had been spent within the infirmary of the retirement residence, surrounded by a couple of of her closest family and friends members.

“We start out with high hopes because people have taught us that just around the corner is happiness and contentment, and all you have to do is be good and try hard and all that. Well, you find out that you can be just as good as you possibly can be, and I mean, you try as hard as you possibly can try, and you still have, you know, the same old thing. You have failures and successes, no? Some things fail and others succeed.”

“Well, then you get quite desperate, you know. And you think, I’m going to work and work, and I’m not going to have any failures, right? But then you find out that failures are inevitable. That you cannot possibly, none of us, you can’t even draw a straight line. You know that. And you can’t have things, and you can’t have all days in which you are sunny and good-natured and everything like that. And you can’t be sweet to people. And you can’t please people either. Well, that is the development. The development is of oneself.”

Martin was adept at utilizing language opaquely, making a display screen of phrases that might veil her from the gaze of the world. Like her enigmatic, resistant work, her statements are designed to specific one thing past the attain of odd understanding, weapons in a marketing campaign to devalue the fabric and elevate the summary.

“I don’t know why it is that people have a tendency to doubt their own mind. To neglect your own mind, that’s like to neglect your consciousness. That’s like to give up all hope of joy and happiness.”

“You’re the only one that can discover for you the meaning of anything. What it means to you. By that, I don’t mean intellectual meaning. I mean, what it means, how it makes you feel. You have to see whether you really are happy or if you are sad. You have to investigate what goes through your mind.”

She wished to be buried within the backyard of the Harwood Museum in Taos, close to a room of work she had donated, however New Mexico regulation forbade it, and so within the spring after her dying, a gaggle assembled at midnight and scaled the adobe partitions with a ladder.

It was a full moon, and so they dug a gap below the roots of an apricot tree, inserting her ashes in a Japanese bowl lined with gold leaf earlier than scattering them within the earth.