“The what of
the painting is incidental to the how.”
Robert Ryman
Robert Ryman
For the American painter Robert Ryman his
paintings are a place where things happen rather than a place that depict
events be they real or abstract. With a musical background Ryman uses the
improvisation process inspired by the Jazz idiom as the catalyst for his works.
As he explained to Art21
“I came from music. And I think that the type of music I
was involved with—jazz, bebop—had an influence on my approach to painting. We
played tunes. No one uses the term anymore. It’s all songs now, telling
stories—very similar to representational painting, where you tell a story with
paint and symbols. But bebop is swing, a more advanced development of swing.
It’s like Bach. You have a chord structure, and you can develop that in many
ways. You can play written compositions and improvise off of those. So, you
learn your instrument, and then you play within a structure. It seemed logical
to begin painting that way. I wasn’t interested in painting a narrative or
telling a story with a painting. Right from the beginning, I felt that I could
do that if I wanted to, but that it wouldn’t be of much interest to me. Music
is an abstract medium, and I thought painting should also just be what it’s
about and not about other things—not about stories or symbolism.”
As the Tate Gallery’s Simon Wilson told the Independent
newspaper “Ryman's playing games with what a picture is . . . He's thinking
about paint, questioning the nature of paint. It's a painting about painting,
questioning the nature of reality.”
After a two-year stint in the United States
army reserve corps the Nashville born saxophonist moved to New York to
study Jazz and in his spare time visited the City’s Museums and art galleries.
To earned his keep Ryman got a job as a security guard at the Museum of Modern
Art and later at the art department of the New York Public Library.
About which he told the Brooklyn Rail “At that
time, it was a perfect job, because, well, I had no money, and I had to live by
my wits, kind of. And so that was a job where I could be close to painting,
close to art, every day. I could see the workings of the museum. It was very
valuable, in that sense, and of course the hours were good too. The museum, at
that time, was open from eleven until six at night, so I had the mornings. And
it paid enough just to pay the rent, and buy new materials. And it wasn’t a
demanding job, where you were expected to grow with the business; it wasn’t
that kind of a thing. It was just a simple job. And I learned so much from that.”
Intrigued by his surroundings Ryman started trying his hand at painting
and at the age of 25 created what he considers to be his first professional
painting Untitled (Orange Painting) (see above). An
experimental work that defined his approach to painting upon which he has built
his career.
About which he has said “My approach tends to be from
experiments. I need the challenge. If I know how to do something well, there’s
no need to do it all the time because it becomes a little monotonous. So, I
like to find a challenge. Of course, all these things are rooted in the basics
of painting. It’s not that I do anything crazy, but I tend to work within a
structure and see what other possibilities there can be.”
The Dia Art Foundation is
currently presenting a Major Survey of Robert Ryman’s work at Dia:Chelsea until
the 18th of June 2016.
No comments:
Post a Comment