![]() The key to this technique, one they all shared, involved a dusky background - the grays and browns and greens of the Pacific Northwest. Callahan used a kind of figurative "white writing," too It's like a bottle of White-Out, filled with Existential yearnings. ![]() One will find armies of humans and animals crowded into the tempera. His paintings were Christian Apocalyptic revelations. Anderson's oeuvre is Leviathan.įinally, there's Ken Callahan. Compared to the size of Tobey's small paintings. He continued to develop his forceful, gestural paintings - big circles and undulating bands of scaled-up brush strokes. ![]() Only Guy Anderson in his later years showed any vitality. Ultimately, Tobey and Graves became mannerists, employees of their old ideas. Morris Graves was as important in introducing the aesthetics of Zen Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta to America as Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, Gerald Heard and Christopher Isherwood. They helped initiate a new and healthier understanding of nature. Eastern concepts of consciousness and creation intrigued them (they were all smitten with Zen, Hinduism, or even Baha'i).Īs mid 20th century American mystics, the senior members of The Northwest School can be considered a visual arm of the Beat Generation: the Beats introduced Eastern disciplines and sacred texts to American literature, the Northwest artists invented a visual vocabulary to accompany this collective search for meaning in our society. Thus Tobey is truly the unsung progenitor of Abstract Expressionism.įor "the Big Four" art was a token of their intellectual journeys - a visual dialogue based on their understanding of the self and its relation to the cosmos. This had never been done before in American art. But he was very interested in Tobey's idea of covering the entire canvas with marks up to and including its edges. Pollock was never really concerned with diffused light. He made some wonderful paintings before he started to be such a drip. Tobey presented small to medium sized canvases, say 33 by 45 inches - Jackson Pollock would see them and go home and blow them up to twelve by nine feet, pouring paint onto the canvas instead of brushing it on. It's been written that Jackson Pollock went to all of Mark Tobey's Willard Gallery shows in New York. Tobey didn't speak to him for twelve years after the Grand Theft. By stealing Tobey's technique, Graves became a national sensation, leaving his master behind. By 1942, he was a sensation, one of eighteen Americans from nine states appearing at the Willard Gallery and the show at the MOMA in 1942 - where he sold eighteen of his paintings, making him a celebrity. He was also a thief, because he stole the "white writing" concept from Tobey - used it to embellish his pictures of woe-begone wounded birds surrounded by moonlight. He was in tune with what Aldous Huxley called the Perennial Philosophy. Graves achieved this by surrounding the picture with light, surrounded the subjects with halos - for instance, the black orb behind a crane's head - which was his attempt to show the source, the origin, the void, the consciousness. The two of them were striving to paint consciousness while things are still in the state of becoming: the nascent, the luminous. Graves took this "white writing" and turned it into moonlight, creating anthropomorphic birds which were symbols for the ecstatic and the melancholy in nature, also called the duality - The Big Deuce. He filled entire canvases with these marks. He was a revolutionary - an inventor of a new way of seeing the world, and art - using abstract, non-referential markings that resembled Oriental calligraphy. Tobey was a stodgemeister: a faux Englishman from Wisconsin. His non-referential markings on canvas were the first of these "white writings." Mark Tobey's calligraphic painting - his gestural marks - were called "white writing." He was a follower of Baha Ullah - a Baha'i - and set out to find the primordial consciousness out of which phenomena erupt, whatever that means. ![]() He also raised dogs, cats, and crows, all them named "Edith" after Edith Sitwell. Morris Graves was a Zen Buddhist, a Vedantist, and a follower of Father Divine. ![]()
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