I drove downtown (Minneapolis) on Friday afternoon to see the Betsy Byers show at the Burnet Art Gallery. It was a useful lesson in abstraction. I like the way her paintings suggest depth without providing the viewer with much that is recognizable. I was also intrigued by her use of line. The colorful geometric shapes carve out a definite sense of space, but the "landscape" that is depicted is certainly a very different place for each individual confronted with it.
http://betsyruthbyers.com/
On Thursday night I returned to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts to see Margaret Wall-Romana's artist talk. She presented a series of "random musings" related to painting and to her process of making paintings. She talked about the importance of "inventing a kind of painting to make". She talked about paintings not functioning as just a window and a surface, but also as a VESSEL that "holds a record of the time you spent making it". She talked about painting's capacity to transport the viewer to another place and that a painting should "give the viewer something to figure out". In other words, a painting should be intriguing and not immediately easily categorized. It should require the viewer to "enter it" and explore it, in order to begin to understand it. The above images are all details of Margaret Wall-Romana's paintings from the MAEP Gallery at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
http://mwallromana.com/
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