Revising Loneliness

Abstract artists are such tragic and romantic figures, akin to preachers or soothsayers, conjuring up spirits, reaching for ghosts buried deep within the body.

This is the mythology.

Franz Kline’s paintings are spontaneous and random, sparks of lines bordering up difficult space.

This is the discovery.

Many of Franz Kline’s paintings are somewhat premeditated.

“He devised a kind of abstraction-through-editing. A 1949 abstract drawing appears to have been physically cut from a larger piece to create a new, ‘found’ composition. (In a similar fashion, Kline used a Bell-Opticon projector to blow up details of drawings, which he then used as bases for full-scale paintings.)” — Holland Carter

Kline was a craftsman– not just an emotional wrecking ball with a can of black paint.

It never stops fascinating me:  how we long to build stories around art, but even more so, around the artists themselves.

“If you’re a painter, you are not alone. There’s no way to be alone. You think and you care and you’re with all the people who care, including the young people who don’t know they do yet.” — Frank Kline (1958)