The hunk of wood again. I wanted to strip the bride bare and her batchellors even… Wondering suddenly if minimalism was born out of a collective exhaustion from making so many large gestures on large canvases during Ab Ex, or was it that a clean Swiss modernism and clean swiss LSD left everyone too stoned to make anything complicated and so stoned that it felt great to think about the simplest things and talk and talk and talk about it.. or some combination of both?
It’s kind of liberating to make a painting that you have no intention of “finishing.”
– later – These photos from Midtown suggest a third idea: that minimalism was born out of a kind of urban landscape painting mixed of course with exhuastion, drugs, and a little philosophy.