The Passing of an Observant, Exploratory & Deeply Personal Artist Ellsworth Kelly
Mr. Kelly was a true original, forging his art equally from the observational exactitude he gained as a youthful bird-watching enthusiast; from skills he developed as a designer of camouflage patterns while in the Army; and from exercises in automatic drawing he picked up from European surrealism. Although his knowledge of, and love for, art history was profound, he was little affected by the contemporary art of his time and country. He was living in France during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism in New York and only distantly aware of art in the United States. When he returned to America in 1954, he settled on what was then an out-of-the-way section of Manhattan for art, the Financial District, and had little interaction with many of his contemporaries. The result was a deeply personal and exploratory art, one that subscribed to no ready orthodoxies, and that opened up wide the possibilities of abstraction for his own generation and those to come.
Nature Means Everything. – Ellsworth Kelly. (preivous post- see more here.)
Ellsworth Kelly’s chair. (via Pascal Blanchard)
Ellsworth Kelly’s seamless monochromatic abstractions are derived from real-life observations and replicate the shapes, shadows and other visual sensations experienced in the surrounding world. The line, form and color of the works elicit a physical and instinctive impact.
“Making art has first of all to do with honesty. My first lesson was to see objectively, to erase all ‘meaning’ of the thing seen. Then only, could the real meaning of it be understood and felt”.
