Research

I got a couple of books, one by Andy Goldsworthy and another about Mark Rothko. In the book about Rothko, it talks about "The Artist's Reality" which is a book of his writings about his work. It sounds like it has some good information but I am having trouble finding it anywhere. What I have found though is some good information on how Goldsworthy goes about doing his work. He says that everyday he goes out he makes one or two pieces, but in a whole month may only get two that are successful. This shows me the importance of creating lots and lots of work. It reminds me of something I read a long time ago about a crafts teacher who had one of his classes focus on creating one great ceramic bowl. In another class he had the students create as many bowls as they could. He found that the class that made multiple bowls generally had better bowls than the class that tried to make one really good bowl. I guess to understand your medium and allow for more freely flowing ideas you must really explore and experiment with your subject. I should attempt to create several pieces a week and with quantity, quality will come. Something else that struck me was how Rothko thought about the early masters of painting. He didn't like Michelangelo, and was not too fond of DaVinci either, he more preferred Giotto saying "Giotto's work had tactility, appealed to the sense of touch, the most concrete evidence of an objects realness." He used this in his work and I think it is important to mine as well because it is through this that I can perhaps use my focus on texture to express the 'realness' of nature.
On Sunday I think I will talk about Terry Winters, who Tom suggested I look at. He does a lot with patterns and textures as well, here is one of his images.

Terry Winters Display Linkage, 2005
oil on canvas
102 x 132 in. (259.1 x 335.3 cm)