Sometimes an artists influences may not be readily detectable in the art work. And arguably as seeing, hearing feeling humans isn’t it very possible everything is an influence and the artist is the distiller? One of my biggest influences in a non- visual way is the singer Nick Cave from the band the Bad Seeds. I’m sharing an article here because honestly I could not impart better the thinking behind influence and if you are not going to feed yourself on the article here is a quote from it.
“There is no blank slate upon which works of true originality are composed, no void out of which total novelty is created. Nothing is original because everything is an influence; everything is original because no influence makes its way into our art untransmuted by our imagination. We bring to everything we make everything we have lived and loved and tessellated into the mosaic of our being. To be an artist in the largest sense is to be fully awake to the totality of life as we encounter it, porous to it and absorbent of it, moved by it and moved to translate those inner quickenings into what we make”. Maria Popova.
Nick Cave on Creativity, the Myth of Originality, and How to Find Your Voice
If you need to feast the blog is called The Marginalian.
Some of my other influences are the quilters known as Gee’s Bend, Tracy Emin, Squeak Carnwath, Cy Twombly, Vivienne Westwood and Miuccia Bianchi Prada. Color combinations, thick worked canvases and gestural mark making stand out to me in any of the paintings and in Westwood’s inventive and subversive approach to fashion and Prada’s design, its absolutely the concise line and color especially in the 2015-18 seasons.
The passing of Westwood in 2022 reminded me of her influence and cemented her place in a recent painting. She a queen, a dame a grand dame. She is the queen bee. Long live the queen. Long live the bees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quilts_of_Gee%27s_Bend
http://www.squeakcarnwath.com
https://gagosian.com/artists/cy-twombly/
https://www.theredhandfiles.com
