Impulse to Action

Monday, April 13, 2026

Studio Day 64

Gertrude Abercrombie, brooch
Milwaukee Art Museum
photo: Larry Wolf (2026)

Marsden Hartley, Garmisch-Partenkirchen (1933)
Milwaukee Art Museum
photo: Larry Wolf (2026)

Marsden Hartley: The First Great American Modernist

– The Earth is All I Know of Wonder

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark

“I think painting for him was a struggle. I think he was always struggling with those basic problems of being alive. ...

"Everything is a potential existential crisis. For an artist, you want potential. You want there to be conflict. Conflict creates friction. Friction create heat. When there's heat, there's potential for combustion, explosion, new knowledge. ..,

"He was never satisfied with his work. At the same time, he was completely convinced of his own genius. That's enough to keep a person going. Why should you quit, if you're a genius? ...

"Hartley's most homoerotic work.. a totemic object.. it's all about the torso.. brute force.. like a tree trunk of a human being right in front of him. These men are elemental forms. It's not about the sweetness and tenderness of familial bonds between two men, it's barely homosexual.

"I want this mountain. I need it. I have to touch it. I have to have it. And the mountain rejects the artist. 'I have been here before you. You cannot possibly possess me.' Nevertheless, he's there trying. Grappling with it. Struggling with the thing he would like to possess. He gets the next best thing which is to possess an elemental symbol or idea of it. He does that with paint.

"I'm always excited to see a Marsen Hartley painting in the flesh, in person, in close contact with it. I'm excited. What I've learned to look for is there are big clumsy brush marks, clunky composition, it's thick. He's not trying to finess reality, he's trying to beat reality out of the thing he's looking at.

American painter Sam McKinniss (b. 1985)

Thursday, April 9, 2026

Studio Day 63

Minor White Archive, Princeton University Art Museum

Research visit scheduled for 25 & 26 June 2026.

Tuesday, April 7, 2026

Studio Day 62

Advance Reader Copy of Douglas Stuart, John of John
photo: Larry Wolf (2026)

"There had been a time in their late twenties when it seemed John could no longer pretend. He would come to Innes, his eyes rubbed pink with guilt and exhaustion. ... In those days, John snuck away more frequently and it was a feast for Innes. They led the dogs on long unnecessary meanders, until they found a hollow in the hillside somewhere dry, somewhere away from the eyes of their neighbours. The land was so bare it was a hard thing to find, but over the years they had come to map all the places they could be together and they came to know them by the flowers that grew nearby, or by the shape of the rocks that hung overhead.

...

"He would ... ask John to spend a sunny afternoon curled up with him, the curtains drawn tight against the world... He had magazines about the gay community and he would read articles about the need to abolish Section 28, about the director who tended a garden next to a nuclear reactor. He would declare that what they were was 'gay'. And John would bear it silently. And he would hate it."

[Douglas Stuart, John of John, pages 169 & 222]

Section 28

the director who tended a garden next to a nuclear reactor / Derek Jarman