Word: marine
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Beware of Swelling. Old John Marin winces at the word. "Don't try to be great," he keeps saying in his letters, "don't try to be important." He recounts how one day, looking at his pictures, his own head began to swell: "It swelled enormously-came near killing me . . ." Nevertheless, like any really fine artist, Marin knows full well the quality of his best work and he cannot help resenting those...
...Things should look right," he says, and though he often speaks of having "spoiled" reams of watercolor paper, he is not above bragging a bit when he has translated nature well. Marin's humility before nature, his craftsmanship before his easel and his lonely pride before the world give his letters the tense, half-humorous, contradictory quality that is their main charm...
That conviction makes him impatient with "expressionist" painting that springs only from imagination. "An idiot surely puts himself into what he does," Marin says, and adds, "the high priest of art don't give a damn who did it." He has even less sympathy for "nonobjective" painters who substitute dead geometry for breathing life...
Curiously, Marin's own pictures are self-expressive and abstract. He usually lets the straight lines and angles that are the scaffolding of his compositions stand in the finished work, and prefers a careless-seeming blot of color to a smooth wash. "The very doing" of a picture, he believes, is part of what the picture has to say, so he makes his paintings look like works-in-progress...
Break the Glass. At first glance the effect is one of sketchiness, but at second it is something altogether different. Many painted landscapes look as if they had been laboriously traced on a pane of glass set between the artist and the scene. Marin's method breaks the glass and lets daylight and fresh air flood...