friendship (1963)

agnes martin, friendship (1963). museum of modern art, new york.

gold leaf.

it glows. wherever the light hits. your form leaves a darkened center when you stand in front of it. a shadow.

as you move around it, it changes. changes everything about itself. colour, texture, hue, dimension.

from the left it takes on the shape of paper time cards stacked beside a clock. from the right it smooths out like an expanding field of wheat. a sea of gold. far enough back it’s smooth & faint.

up close it becomes rugged, pocked with texture & moments of almost red scratched through. the lines, etched down to the canvas, become gashes across a face or the raised scars on a wrist. the moments of red… blood?

it undulates & the gold rolls as you tilt your head. between water & oil…

something else, mercury like & waiting to either poison you or wrap you in warmth.

I close my eyes. I can feel the gold on my face like the sun.

on wheat, by agnes martin, 1957

sitting in front of “wheat”

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it’s mesmerizing. like a golden field stretched out for a thousand miles on a clear warm day—but not too hot. the kind of day when there’s a breeze that prickles your skin but you don’t go inside to get your jacket.

at first the grey border looks like one shade as you’re drawn into the fields of wheat, but after a moment you realise its two types of grey fringing the field like vaseline on a camera lens. it pushes you in.

wheat whispers to you so quietly that at first you’re not sure if its a voice or a gust through the tree branches. but it is a voice & you can barely make out what it’s saying. maybe the words don’t matter? maybe they don’t have any meaning anyway.

a woman comes into the gallery & stands in front of wheat. perfectly centered. the center column rises from her like steam.

she’s enveloped in yellows like a goddess or the painting of one, with a delicate shimmering halo.

is this what agnes wanted us to do? daydream into her paintings?

six paintings by agnes martin at sf moma

sitting in a seven sided room at the san francisco museum of modern art.

you can’t photograph these, your picture looks like a solid canvas with nothing special about it.

it’s easy to walk by quickly & not really look. I see several people do that, from older couples to teens with dyed hair. they’re missing it & they don’t even know it because they don’t take the time to look. there’s a cultural comment in that, it’s a sign of the times maybe.

so many people don’t get it. the order found in chaos. it’s comforting if you let it be. it’s soothing. & when you get close to it you start to see the chaos creeping out… trickling out… a faucet that’s started to drip.

the grids are bursting at the seams but if you’re not close enough you’d never even know.

it kind of makes me sad the number of people who won’t even come into the gallery to look. I think they’re afraid of the silence… or maybe I’m being pretentious. but these are paintings you have to look at, right now, & you can’t take their picture & bring them with you. they aren’t bite sized.

there's texture to the paint too… the whisper of agnes’ voice.

the edges aren’t sharp—but dreamlike—it all starts to roll together.

on night sea, by agnes martin, 1963

sitting in front of “night sea”

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it is completely different in person. it doesn’t even look like the pictures on the internet.

the gold leaf literally sparkles, but the line is so fine you have to lean in close to see it. it has to catch the light.

& it’s not blue! it’s more turquoise, but not a steady shade. each individual rectangle has a gradient from deep turquoise to deep ocean blue. the lines start to shift as you look at it. they start to trick you. & this is how you’re pulled in, like quicksand in slow motion.

& you can see her. where the lines don’t quite match up or reach the edges of the canvas. that’s where agnes lives.

it stands out for its depth. the way I feel sometimes when I cross a bridge & a voice says “jump”.

night sea undulates the way the ocean does when there’s not a shoreline in sight. it feels like floating on your back & you just dip your ears below the water. sound becomes just a suggestion. you’re in a different world now. do you have a body? does it matter? maybe you & your body are the same thing as the water. maybe there’s no grid where your body ends & the water begins.