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Back to Pollock's Over Splatter

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Over-Splatter and Photographic Support While the concept of using splotches and drips, on front and backs of Jackson Pollock’s painting, to ascertain the sequence of creation may seem intuitive at best, photographic evidence supports the veracity of the over-splatter tool. Three specific paintings photographed during their sequential creation provide a baseline that makes clear the numbering method used to assign inventory control is clearly not an indicator of sequence. Both photographic evidence offered by the Namuth images and examination of over-splatter establish the following order of creation. The numbers assigned to the paintings by Parsons are 30, 31, 32. 30 is the MoMA (Number One) painting, 31 belongs to the MET (Autumn Rhythm), and 32 is in Dusseldorf. Not only is it irrefutable in the Namuth images, but supported by the over-splatter on the completed works that the order in which these three artworks were painted is: 31, followed by 30, and lastly 32. Since...
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Flowers Without Outlines

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Flowers Without Outlines One purpose of education, Especially in grade school, Is to assimilate And conform to norms. Modelling, i.e. showing the desired answers Is reinforced by good or bad grades Praise or punishment. Praise is a sort of gentle whip. I recall Mrs. Lockjaw’s reaction To my Crayola drawing. “My what pretty flowers you have drawn. Now, you should outline the petals Make them look more like The rest of the class. You do want to go to recess Not the principal’s office, Don’t you”? I was led across the hall To the principal’s office. Today, 68 years later I will go for a walk. Hopefully, there will still be flowers Without outlines. visit Sandy Kinnee.com
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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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The Old Lady and Her Bookshelf

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The Library Book I have always liked old libraries and ancient books. Books and libraries were such advanced technologies and wonderous sources of images and ideas. Note I put this as past tense. Years ago I began a project called the Library Book. The intent was to express my joy of discovery when I was in a library. My travels have taken me from my hometown Carnegie Library to the old Springfield Massachusetts Library, various university and college libraries, the New York Public Library, The Library of Congress, the private library of the French Senat, and the reading room of the National Library of France. But where I spent the most time exploring was in stacks of Tutt Library at Colorado College. My Library Book was put on hold when the college renovated the building. During the process of remodeling the structure, the concept of what a library is was also readdressed. At that point in time many books were culled from the collection and carted off to a landfill, much l...
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Message in a Bottle

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Message in a Bottle Artworks are made by living beings and ultimately put into a bottle and cast into the see The same, too, with poems visit Sandy Kinnee.com
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Looking closely at Jackson Pollock’s 1953 painting: The Deep

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Pollock’s The Deep Staple gunned canvas Plenty of bristles Forever floating In a vanilla Milkshake sea Protected long After Jackson’s Death by a polished Aluminum Kulicke frame Likely welded by So-called minor Artist Robert Kulicke Himself Pollock makes It obvious He is painting Not on the floor With a stick Using a bargain House painters Brush for Do it yourselfers Horse hairs shed Everywhere Deliver an overt Message: "I can Paint also With a brush" Looking closely at Jackson Pollock’s 1953 painting: The Deep In the collection of the Centre Pompidou. visit Sandy Kinnee.com
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New Broom Sweeps Clean

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A New Broom Sweeps Clean She was a new broom Not a metaphor He leaned her against His work van A red bucket and An electrical cord Sat on the pavement Either side of her Neither electrical cord Nor bucket was new As metaphors they might be jealous Of the broom’s Sex appeal He washed his hands Before he swept with her She would soon lose Her sparkle Become yet another Old broom That forgets how to sweep clean visit Sandy Kinnee.com
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Driving Clement Greenberg to the Airport

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Clement Greenberg Wearing a Helmet (or the conversation he and I never had) I, too, would be skeptical of the following tale if this hadn’t involved me. This event I am about to describe took place back in the 1970s while I worked at a college art museum. The curator of modern art, whom I very recently spoke with (2018), remembered this visit, but not the purpose. There was no talk, event or exhibition. My role was to drive Clement Greenberg to the airport. During the drive we talked mainly about Picasso’s death and his late work. I, unfortunately, remember no details of the conversation except that neither one of us cared much for Picasso’s late work. I believe Greenberg said that someday in the future people may give the paintings more consideration. I wish I had thought to record our conversation and I most certainly wish that I had at that time the knowledge and interest, which I now have in Pollock, so I might ask the questions that I would like answered. In particula...
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Snow Day

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Snow Day Pagan is such a strange word for you to use in connection with snowmen. I expect you intend something such as pre-Christian or pre-Muslim or pre-Organized religion. Snowmen are connected to those cultures and peoples who live in climates that have snow and especially have a history with the Ice Age. Those who stayed in place during the harsh winters rather than migrating great distances can relate to the snowman. To others the snowman is a game or curiosity. Is my book based upon fact, complete with smoking gun? No. Have you ever made a snowman and six months later examined the remains of what had been the snowman? When was the last time you ate a turkey for Thanksgiving? Where are the remains that prove you ate the bird? I have no proof that Ice Age humans made a decision to substitute human sacrifice with symbolic snowmen. But, when you look at any ancient children’s game you will find a darker origin that has been sanitized during the past hundred or so year...
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Lautrec and the Cardboard Paintings

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The So-Called Cardboard That Toulouse Lautrec Painted Upon Not all cardboard is created equal. Let me point out that Henri Toulouse Lautrec worked on canvas, paper, and what is called cardboard. The type of cardboard is not what comes to mind when we picture cardboard. It is neither corrugated nor the brownish processed kraft material composed of wood pulp. It is a pressed material that is sometimes known as pasteboard. The color is generally a neutral grey. If one takes a commercially available artist’s canvas panel and peals off the canvas, you would have a piece of pasteboard that approximates the material HTL painted upon using essence (gasoline) thinned oil paint. The medium allows for a non-gloss finish to the color When you see an illustration of one of Luatrec's paintings done with this medium on board you miss the luscious matte quality of the way the material first soaks into the pasteboard and then evaporates. So, why did Henri de Toulouse Lautrec use this p...
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"Ugly Art", He Said

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Ugly Art He Said Brian wondered how I could spend so much time making ugly art when there is so much beauty in the world to paint Why not paint the lake in the morning? Roses and marigolds in a vase? Or the way sunlight makes a halo out of hair if you stand in just the right spot in the late afternoon? Brian was an old man I was a kid fresh out of art school Years passed And then Brian became an older man and didn't sleep anymore After his wife Lilian passed away she the one whose hair looked like a halo in the late afternoon Brian set up a studio in his basement A horizontal sheet of plywood covered his pool table A slab of Sumi ink, brushes, paper He promised to show me what he'd been doing down there alone and I promised to go look He said I'm sorry for what I said about you wasting time making ugly art It isn't ugly at all once you look at it instead of hair glowing in the late afternoon light "It is it...
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Off To Look Closely at Another Pollock

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Eyeball Adventure I am on a plane heading off alone to look at paintings in a museum It's not my job or if it is no one is paying me. I look because I can. A number of Jackson Pollock's paintings are on exhibit and I will do what I do and look for those stray anomalous drips Whether or not I find drips it is an eyeball adventure
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The Boy Who Painted Blue Elephants

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The Boy Who Painted Blue Elephants He was an optimistic and hopeful young artist with buckets and buckets of promise. But at age 24 an ancient Roman elephant fell on him, breaking his only left leg and radically altering the remaining seventy-six years of his artistic career. From that day forward the focus of his paintings was the depiction of Evil and aggressive Elephants. Between 1971 and 1980 the elephant paintings were all limited to shades of blue. Art critics and historians suggested a link to Picasso’s “Blue Period.” However, the sad truth is he never really fancied and therefore did not want to emulate Pablo Picasso. Instead, the leg broken by the elephant event caused him to limp so severely that he veered toward the left. In the art supply store, where he purchased his supplies, colors were arranged with reds on the right side of the display and blues on the extreme left. No matter how much he might have wanted to buy a tube of cadmium red or yellow ochre, his l...
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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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Two Laundry Poems: Folding Laundry in Rome & Brautigan’s Craft

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Folding Laundry In Rome Perhaps they were songbirds squabbling outside in the trees They seem not to notice that the sun engulfs them and warms their feathers They squawk in spite of an absence of the dark and spitting clouds that until yesterday had plagued my short Roman Holiday These birds should be rejoicing, singing hosannas Instead, they peck at each other and I stand inside folding laundry before it wrinkles. Brautigan’s Laundry A dirty shirt rinsed in whiskey and put into a hot drier, then forgotten; coming out still dirty, smelling of booze, and more wrinkled than ever. I had entered Richard Brautigan's houses, cabins, hotel rooms, apartments and not only gone through his filthy laundry, but tried it all on, piece by piece Writing is laundry (is this a poem within a poem?) When all the shirts have been washed, dried, and hung. After the socks cleaned and matched put into drawe...
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Paint It BLACK: Shipwreck With Countless Spectators Helpless to Save Them

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That Old Shipwreck Scene Neither that rainstorm in the middle of the night Nor the brilliant sunlit day changes a thing The castaways are doomed Those well-fed victims clinging to a black raft Mounted on the wall in the Louvre Will float adrift forever waving at that distant ship Never to be rescued Yet never to eat nor starve And I say well fed because these are models Parisians with full bellies and not those Who at the moment depicted Had neither nibble nor sip for two weeks Always in torment much like a frozen ball Of worms or tangled marionettes smeared with tar Painted with bitumen a fake paint And their tipsy raft is lost upon choppy water Meringue on lemon pie not yet cut into wedges Never placed on the table with fork and cup of tea Just a raft of people who have perpetually Lost their boat and are fated to float till the end of time Last night’s rain will not quench their thirst None of the thousands who walk through the gallery May p...
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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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Alice Neel Said I Reminded Her of a Cat

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Alice Neel Said I Reminded Her of a Cat Before they met me people (might) have, thanks to my nickname, leapt to the seemingly logical assumption that since my artwork was wonderful, I was worthy to be a celebrated Woman Artist. Female artists such as Sandy Kinnee, deserve to be admired. I happened to have timed my entrance into the Art World better than M. E. O’Hare, who was a kick ass painter as well as being my aunt. When she was starting out in the 1940s, being a Woman Artist in a tiny gallery world designed for and run primarily by males, was not her choice. She chose the route of taking commissions and painting portraits. Her gender was obscured by her use of her initials. There were many women artists, few were taken seriously, despite the quality of their work. By the time I leapt into the first little puddle in the art world, there was an awareness that all along women had been making art and it was damn well time they be taken seriously. Women artists w...
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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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