Frank Stella was suggested to me as a resource when I started to explore painting in the expanded field and incorporating objects and materials within painting. Stella is an American painter mainly working in painting, sculpture and printmaking, working with ideas around minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.
I started by simply looking visually and I was struck by the freedom and lack of refinement, I don’t mean this as an insult, I prefer some amount of exposed construction as it allows the mind to focus on the core elements and materiality. I also clearly saw the similarities others noticed between my work and his, particularly the later objects like the one below.
Stella has a clear interest in materiality and from watching interviews he is more material than contextual in some ways. He states that his industrial interest and use of manufacturer’s paint was a cost consideration, and that working in series was a similar choice, approaching things many times to get as much as you can out of an idea or a mood.
Stella also talks about how for him the reality of the work comes from the effort of the expression, which is the way he approaches his work, constantly changing the ways of expressing to push ideas forward. This allows him to create wild paintings and sculptures that are sort of both and neither at once, like many of the references I have looked at this year freedom of expression is the thing that attracts me to his work and his practice.
I also relate strongly to Stella’s notion of changing his practice and approach regularly, this is something I have wrestled with across my whole degree; in three years during a pandemic I have gone from small-scale drawing and painting, to large-scale sculpture and installation, and now to sound/video/performance and interactive installation.
The sporadic nature of my practice has been commented on as ‘lost’ which is an accurate statement; I have barely started my career and artistic journey, it is not surprising I seem lost or overwhelmed. This lack of knowledge can be an advantage, as it allows me to explore the world without many preconceived notions, aiding me to think in different ways.
One way of expressing this is that if I knew everything about process, colour, art history etc. now then I might write off certain approaches or ideas because of this knowledge. Whereas in my novice state I can freely explore anything, as long as I can overcome the fear of leaving familiar territory, this is something I will approach through play like Stella and others.
Looking more deeply into Stella’s artwork and process revealed not just the material and physical aspects I can learn from to develop my artwork, but also the behavioral and conceptual aspects of Stella himself. In short I have been inspired by his work (in terms of form and blurring lines between media) and him as a practitioner (a driven artist with varied interests and changing motivations) separate from his work. This is similar to other artists I have researched in the past like Phyllida Barlow, David Medalla, Anne Hardy and Richard Wentworth.
Reflecting on this research I am considering ways of making canvas’ more like objects, hardening them with varnish or mod-roc perhaps. I also want to try and explore bringing paintings off the wall perhaps connecting them across the space or even ‘spreading’ them (by separating them) around the space.
This research has also inspired me to experiment with series when it comes to ideas, which I normally do not do. Stella states in interview that he uses series as a way to almost stop an idea and explore it laterally, then collapse all of this learning into the next idea.
In this way he developed an evolving practice that is unified by his approach to making the work conceptually, which expresses itself in a wide range of forms and media, he describes this as taking conceptual control over the freedom found within experimentation and expression. This is something he says he learned from observing the fate of some abstract expressionists, who became lost in their mark making experiments and did not bring formality back to maintain the balance required in painting.
Frank Stella 3-D Paper Collage – NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale
Frank Stella: A Retrospective – YouTube
Studio Visit with Artist Frank Stella | Christie’s – YouTube