Riffing on Franz Kline

A month after seeing the Ab Ex show in Toronto I was back in the studio in Port Rexton. The room with three or four Klines in the exhibition made a real impression on me. I had always liked Kline and have seen great work of his in San Francisco at SF MOMA and other places but there was something potent about the pieces in the Ab Ex show taking a room of the their own and rubbing up against each other to create some real heat. There was an essence of the idea of what abstract expressionism could be that was contained in that small space. Gestural and spontaneous and bold the Klines came at you and didn't sit politely on the walls as some kind of background decoration or argument for some thesis.

After being at MOMA in New York a few weeks ago I was reminded of how narrowly the argument for modernism has been presented over the years by curators there supported by their own collection and the works that keep appearing over and over again in art history texts like Jansen and Gardiner. Granted the Klines in the Ab Ex show were from MOMA but Kline has never received the attention that Pollack, Rothko, de Kooning, and Newman have received. I think the show went a long way to changing that for me. Especially because I was underwhelmed, I think because of over familiarity, with the late Rothko's and the the Pollacks. There were some early Pollacks that I loved like Stenographic Figures, C1942, but the later drip paintings, at least the ones in that show, that I used to find so muscular, left me cold.

Franz Kline Stopped By... was created as a response to Kline but one using the materials and the approach to image making that I have been practicing in Newfoundland. The following poem is an integral part of the piece and would be on the wall beside it.

Franz Kline stopped

by the studio today

we drank a cup of tea

and listened to Jimi Hendrix

Live at The BBC

what’s with the driftwood

says he,

yiss bye, says I

A little more time in heaven

And you’ll knows why