Still painting; it has something to do with the time of year, when there is colour about.
Painting makes me anxious; I feel overwhelmed at times by the theory and discourse around painting; is it ok to paint? what does it mean to paint – as a woman – what would feminist painting now be about compared say to the 60s and 70s? Is there any point in painting (as a woman – Baselitz persists in saying women are no good at it)? Does it mean anything or does it have to mean anything?
Bearing all that in mind, I have just read an interesting essay by Helen Molesworth – Painting with Ambivalence which discusses work by Joan Snyder, Howardena Pindell, Mary Heilmann. All three use the grid, repetition and abstraction. She references Krauss’s text on the grid and the trauma of the symbolist window behind the grid and then, I think, goes further, arguing that the work by these artists “courts the traumatic inasmuch as it sits outside language.”
That bit about the grid and trauma, I find interesting and relevant to my own work.
I’ve also been looking at work by Ghad Amer who integrates embroidery into abstract painting: “I create materially abstract paintings, but I integrate in this male field a feminine universe: that of sewing and embroidery.“
