Word: marden
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...break the mold, Marden in the mid-'80s started doing calligraphic drawings, not with a brush but with twigs of ailanthus wood -- ailanthus being the common weed tree that grows in every sidewalk crack in Lower Manhattan but is known to the Chinese as the tree of heaven. Stuck in a long holder and dipped in ink, these flexible little sticks delivered a blobby, rough line, far from the look of classical brush drawing but with some of its improvised character...
...course, an enthusiasm for calligraphy guarantees an artist nothing. For decades, America has been full of bad abstract painting based on Chinese and Japanese ideograms -- it goes with wind-bells and Bay Area Zen. If Marden's work avoids that cliche, it is because of his accommodation with Western gestural drawing -- specifically Pollock's -- in its speed, amplitude of space and openness to chance. In these paintings you see Marden thinking about Pollock, rather slowly. Marden's black, groping line offers a kind of schematic reduction of Pollock's all-over...
...line," wrote Paul Klee back in the days of the Bauhaus, "likes to go for a walk." This is true of Marden's paintings, which at first sight seem to consist of nothing but line, moving across the surface in an improvised way full of checks, turnings, erasures -- a maze making itself. The nature of the line is intimately involved with the tool Marden uses, which is in effect the ailanthus twig writ large: a long-handled brush with flitchlike bristles, floppy rather than stiff, whose ramblings convey an air of reflective uncertainty. Not for Marden the forceful calligraphic rush...
There is a small amount of color in these paintings -- generally strokes of earth green and rubbed patches of raw umber -- but the prevalent hue of the gray-to-silver monochrome seems to change from canvas to canvas, emitting different tints of light. Marden scrapes back and sandpapers the canvas, leaving the ghosts of one layer of paint behind the other; this subtlety (the equivalent of the nuances inside the coats of wax in his earlier work) plays off against the roughness of the lines. Sometimes a whole web of dark line gets canceled, whited out, but roughly -- on those...
...Brice Marden: best abstract painter of his generation...