Aesthetic Work

Helen Frankenthaler
Japanese Maple (woodblock)

Ira Barkoff
Ocean Bright (oil)

Wolf Kahn
Seaweed Fingers (pastel)

What do these 3 artists have in common besides the fact that I admire them? It is the luminous fields of color that they create -- great fluid fields that wash across wood and canvas and paper, intense saturation, so deep one can sink into the surface, perhaps never to emerge again.

The French mathematician and philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, once wrote,

the great function of poetry is to give back to us
the situations of our dreams.

The same can be said of art -- these intimate immensities, these visual states that seem to lead to a sense of the infinite . . .

I think that is the quality of great art. One can but hope to achieve even a degree of that --