Diane McGregor: Working Space

I have titled my blog "Working Space" after Frank Stella's book of the same title. I am hoping that this blog will provide a conversation about art, pictorial theory, art history and criticism. I am passionately devoted to abstract and non-objective painting, and so my posts will most likely reflect that interest.

Stella writes in his book: "No one wants abstraction to turn itself around to accommodate the innate taste for illusionism; but abstraction has to recognize that the coziness it has created with its sense of reduced, shallow illusionism is not going anywhere. Caravaggio and Rubens made manageable pictorial sense out of the dynamic illustrative diversity of 16th century painting, building a strong base for future painting.... Somehow painting today, especially abstract painting, cannot bring itself to declare what Caravaggio and Rubens demonstated again and again -- that picture building is everything. Abstraction seems to be lost in a dream in which the materiality of pigment reveals painting. It puts too much hope in the efficacy of clever, random gestures. What is needed is a serious effort at structural inventiveness."