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

Helen Frankenthaler is my Lodestar

Cri de Coeur 5951, © Nancy Charak, 2010, watercolor, prismacolor pencil on unfinished fabricated birchwood panel, 18”x24”

I can honestly say that there’s a very real sense in which I have never not known about Helen Frankenthaler and her work. My mother was a great admirer of Helen’s art, returned from a vacation in New York gushing about what she had seen when I was still in grammar school. To my sorrow that catalogue has disappeared. A good friend from junior and senior high school had Frankenthaler’s work in her house, along with Picassos and Kandinskys.

Tales of Genii III, Helen Frankenthaler, 1998, fifty-three-color woodcut from 18 woodblocks (17 maple, 1 mahogany) and 2 stencils on gray TGL handmade paper,” 47x42” (119.4x106.7cm), Edition 36, Artist’s proofs 14.

I choose Helen Frankenthaler because she is the head of a pantheon of abstract expressionists; to name a few, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, Linda Karshan, Sandra Blow, Vija Celmins and Katherina Grosse. Purity of thought and action on the canvas emanate from Frankenthaler’s work, even if that work is a 53 color woodcut.

The Frankenthaler woodcuts astonish because they continue her pattern of breaking rules and ignoring conventional modes of working art media. She is widely credited with being the first to work with unprimed canvases, allowing oil paint to halo and stain, and in so doing, to influence a number of artists, Jules Olitski and Sam Francis as foremost examples.



Helen Frankenthaler is my lodestar. I keep two quotes from her displayed in my studio, “A really good picture looks as if it’s happened all at once. It’s an immediate image. For my own work when a picture looks labored and you can read in it—well she did this, and then she did that, and then she did that—there is something in it that has not got to do with beautiful art to me.”[1]

In the description of the exhibit of the woodcuts at the National Gallery of Australia’s website, she is quoted, “There are no rules, that is one thing I say about every medium, every picture. . .that is how art is born, that is how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules, that is what invention is about.” [2] [1]Ibid

[2] http://nga.gov.au/Exhibition/Frankenthaler/