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So Much Seeing to be Done

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From Matisse to Pollock to Whom? Funny how looking at a Matisse twenty years ago has taken me on a meander to Pollock and Monet and many other artists Looking closely leads to seeing Seeing can provoke observation and thinking I stroke my naked chin as I tilt my head Pondering the possible implications of what I see that can never be found when looking at a poster or art book Matisse was my baseline For decades the thing I most enjoyed was how he let his footsteps show When I saw one of his paintings on a gallery wall I made a point of heading in his direction so he might reveal to me what he had been thinking as he painted I looked at his color choices his alterations of shape or composition. In virtually every case he left a sliver of the original choice visible It was most delightful when he over-painted an area of color with a new color Each layer of paint indicated not just a change in hue but a refinement Matisse painted until the pai...
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Brown Paper Grocery Bag Drawings

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Brown Paper Grocery Bag Drawings I was four or five years old and knew This boy and that girl only from afar Sounds from their moving lips Not words just strange noises They looked like drawings of people Made with a yellow pencil On a brown paper bag, then erased Not a new yellow pencil On the first day of school But the kind of pencil that someone Chews and bites, a stubby pencil With a hard nub of a pink eraser I did not play with these children They did not play with me Their mothers looked at the dirt Their mothers were also erased Drawings on brown grocery bags No one spoke of these wraiths Beings that came one week And vanished the next Hauntingly invisible Five Birthday Candles and a Gauze Fuse Having been born after World War II, what would I, as a small child know of massive scale human displacement? How was my little brain to deal with the idea that most men I saw had two legs and my neighbor only one. I took it as mat...
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Rauschenberg Erases a DeKooning Drawing

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The Fabrication of Nothing: The Erased de Kooning Drawing On a cool morning, with a touch of winter in the air, it can make us smile to see evidence of our own breath. It surprises us when we see our own breath made visible. We take air for granted, we don’t have to see it. Some art is like air. Robert Rauschenberg’s white on white paintings and his “Erased de Kooning Drawing” are artworks we don’t need to see to understand. The concept satisfies our minds, well enough to bypass our eyes. The weight of these artworks is not physical, but completely conceptual. Yet, they do exist as objects. Robert Rauschenberg painstakingly erased a Willelm deKooning drawing, producing the infamous “Erased deKooning Drawing”, of 1953. One action obliterated another act, creating while destroying, making while undoing. It was as bold as it was blasphemous. The “Erased de Kooning Drawing” is known mainly to artists and modernists. Amongst this group it is legendary. However, few a...
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The Lunch Box Has a Prize at the End

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The Lunch Box Each morning he packed his own lunch: always a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on Wonder bread, an apple (in season) or a banana, one store-bought oatmeal cookie, and a thermos of hot coffee, tepid by the time he drank it. It was not a very good thermos. Ex-cept for the lukewarm coffee, it was the same lunch he had carried to school, as a boy. It was his regular lunch, all his life. As a child the only difference was in beverage, a half pint of chilled chocolate milk purchased each lunch hour in the cafetorium, meaning there was no need for a thermos bottle. A disposable brown paper sack was all he needed to carry his waxpaper wrapped sandwich, fruit, and cookie. His brown bag lunch was like anyone else carried, except in one aspect. All other students chucked their emptied bag into the trash can as the back-to-class bell rang. He kept his brown sack, folding it flat, smoothing it and making a small drawing. When the bell rang he put the dec-orated bag in hi...
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Exhibited at MoMA with It's Face to the Wall

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The Artwork Displayed Face to the Wall Here’s a category that was probably never even considered by the Guinness Book of Records; “Artworks hung face to the wall.” Thank you very much for allowing me to hold this distinction. The Museum of Modern Art , in New York organized an exhibition of works on handmade paper, in 1976. Kathy Markel called to tell me she was loaning a piece to of mine to the exhibition. I was too busy with the Venturi renovation and addition to the Allen Art Museum, at Oberlin College, to go see the show until toward the end. A friend who often helped me in the studio, Walter Bosstick, was in New York about a month after the exhibition opened and reported back to me the following: “The piece they are showing is beautiful. It’s displayed in between a Jim Dine and a Robert Rauschenberg. But, you know, I thought I knew all your work and this one is very subtle.” I asked him to describe it, since I didn’t know which piece was selected. He did an...
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Getty's Elephants

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A policeman stopped by to ask questions and fill out paperwork. That my left pant leg had been split up to my knee by the paramedics might have caught his eye. So, he wanted to know if I was involved in a traffic accident? No, an elephant sent me to the hospital. Most probably the officer was familiar with a recent incident at St. Paul’s Como Zoo. The story made front page in the papers. Two drunks had decided to wrestle a polar bear. It was night time, the zoo closed. The drunker of the two managed to climb into the bear’s enclosure. Sadly for the polar bear; the police, responding to screams, came to the rescue of the drunk. This Policeman could see that I was completely sober. So it must have been a mystery to him how I could have gotten tangled up with an elephant in Minneapolis, especially at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. I was a twenty-five-year-old art handler for the Minneapolis Institute of Art. I had recently returned from Malibu, where I had been crating pai...
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What Prepared Me to See Pollock's Over-Splatter

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  Jackson Pollock's  Over-Splatter,   How They Happened, Where They are Located, Why They Went Unnoted for More than Fifty Years, and How They May be Understood and Put to Use By Sandy Kinnee and Lauren Kinnee, Ph.D. Once You See the Drips You will Always See them PRELUDE What Prepared Me to See Pollock's Over-Splatter I believe part what prepared me to notice the stray drips in Pollocks paintings was my fascination with Al Hirschfeld's caricatures which appeared every Sunday in the Arts and Leisure section of the New York Times. Each Sunday I looked forward to see how many times the name of Hirschfeld's daughter, Nina, was hidden in his caricature. The number next to his signature indicated the number of times NINA could be found. I was good at it and it was fun. Finding Nina was a game. In a black and white line drawing certain areas would be prime NINA hiding places, week after week. Any type of hair and fold in clothing were where I would search first. Anoth...
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Introduction to Jackson Pollock's Over-Splatter

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  Jackson Pollock's Over-Splatter,   How They Happened, Where They are Located, Why They Went Unnoted for More than Fifty Years, and How They May be Understood and Put to Use By Sandy Kinnee and Lauren Kinnee, Ph.D. Once You See the Drips You will Always See them PART 1 The following was written in 2002 and published in the online magazine Life Sherpa, April 2003 Art DNA: Pollock's Extra Drips by Sandy Kinnee Redwood trees belong in California. What would you make of the discovery of a stand of six redwood trees in an east coast forest surrounded by the expected indigenous deciduous oaks, maples, elms, and the odd birch thrown in for bio diversity? The following relates to my experience in front of some of my favorite paintings in the Museum of Modern Art. Just like you, when I look at an artwork, I come with my own baggage. What I've seen previously, what I know from school and my experience of working in museums, relationships with similar artworks, all come into p...
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Jackson Pollock's Over-Splatter

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  Jackson Pollock's Over-Splatter,   How They Happened, Where They are Located, Why They Went Unnoted for More than Fifty Years, and How They May be Understood and Put to Use By Sandy Kinnee and Lauren Kinnee, Ph.D. Once You See the Drips You will Always See them PART 2 Jackson Pollock’s Stray Drips (Over-Splatter): Their origins and implications   Abstract   This paper proposes a wholly new method for reconstructing the chronology of Jackson Pollock's oeuvre based on the presence of drips of stray pigment on otherwise cohesive canvases.  Pollock, after having finished a painting and let it dry, moved it to the side in his studio where it occasionally accumulated drips and other marks that were the byproduct of his working method.  These marks, here termed ‘over-splatter,’ are present on both recto and verso of many Pollocks in major museums.  Lavender Mist of 1950, for example, has a large and distinctive red splotch on the front, right s...
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