Fred Martin Paintings October 2006

Paintings, October-November 2006
(There were only four in these two months. The world was too much with me then.)

#1, November 2006

All paintings are acrylic on paper, 44 x 30 inches
unless otherwise noted.

Scroll down for the paintings, click the images for larger views.


#1, October 2006 The dark silence of the senses is all you know and all you need to know.	#2, October 2006 "The Justice of Things" Studio notes about the painting... October 13, 2006. Oakland, night. Homely homilies for an old man-- It is the justice Of things to things That they come to be And pass away.

#3, October 2006 Studio notes about the painting-- October 15, 2006 Oakland, night. Old days, old ways pass. Things stay longer. It is for me now to tell their stories. Signed FM in a gold seal. It is my promise to time. Things grow old and break. You cannot save them, but you must try.	*#1, November 2006.*

From October Studio Notes... October 30, 2006 Oakland, afternoon. Thoughts about Old Age Style... 1. Some artists to think about… a. Titian and the Flaying of Marsyas b. Rembrandt and the Batavians c. Monet and the Nymphéas d. DeKooning and the late paintings Other artists to think about… Kollwitz (the 1930’s Death Series), Grosz (the 1940’s paintings in America), Munch (Between Clock and Bed), Matisse (the late works on the ceiling) 2. Research… Martin S. Lindauer: Ageing, Creativity and Art (The Springer Series in Adult Development and Ageing). 2003. 3. Questions… A. Although “old age style” seems to exist and can be identified (see Lindauer), nonetheless, because there are a few famous artists who might show characteristics of that style, does that mean than all famous or unknown artists of that age group must somehow show that style? (And, what is a style?) B. What might be the personality characteristics of those who show that style (Titian, etc., above)… Was Titian that angry? Was Rembrandt so out of touch with the art market of his late years as not to know his Batavians would be rejected as public decoration? Was the “spaceless space” of Monet’s Nymphéas only the consequence of failed cataract operations, or was he opening into the cosmos as in Dane Rudhyar’s Astrology of Personality, (Doubleday, 1970) third phase of human life? Were DeKooning’s late works mostly his, or mostly the product of studio assistants completing his work at the behest of the art market? And as for my own work these last years, how much comes from the formal needs in painting, and how much from the fear of death? (See http://www.fredmartin.net/Exhibitions-2004_Death_Show.htm#About%20painting%201,%20July%202004 .) And did Titian, Rembrandt, Monet and DeKooning also fear? Is it that the fear of death we all have impersonally abstractly all our lives becomes personally concretely ours at some empirically identifiable point in every life—even in the lives of artists no one ever heard of? Is it that now so real fear and the ever undying fight of life against it, is it that conflict which makes “old age style”? Directory to all Fred Martin's Art.