I Walk in Agnes Martin's Footsteps

I write frequently about Agnes Martin on this blog. You can see more, learn more about this critically important artist over at ARTSY's page. Agnes Martin the master of the minimal.

In my own Art Statement I say this: "I walk in the footsteps of giants: Helen Frankenthaler, Agnes Martin and Joan Mitchell for the purity of their thought and action on the canvas as well as Linda Karshan, Sandra Blow, Vija Celmins, and Katherina Grosse. Whether what they do is lyrical, expository or just plain brash, to my way of thinking they are all pure abstract expressionists who make marks, lines, shapes, colors on paper, canvas, even buildings, and say to us, “here look at this, make of it what you will."

Below are some of my latest pieces from my website, rounderstudio dot com. At the moment this series is labeled Long Short, but the name is being changed to a more lyrical, hopefully more mysterious title, Bonitas Canciones, beautiful songs as sung by Mili Bermejo. This is an ongoing series, there are yet more to come, some are at my photographer, Jack Kulawik jrkphoto [at] yahoo [dot] com in Tucson AZ.

These are 11″x30″, graphite pencil, conte, prismacolor, erasure, pencil shavings and smudge on 90# Stonehenge, 2017. After a long summer working on paintings on canvas, I decided to challenge myself to return to working with drawing on paper, in an unfamiliar format for me, longitudinal. I cut 22″x30″ sheets of 90# Stonehenge in half. The self-imposed limitation of just drawing helped limit the palette to mostly grey tones and bits of color.

Bonitas Canciones #19, Nancy Charak artist c.2017

Bonitas Canciones #22, Nancy Charak artist c.2017