Symposium: Hans Hofmann in a New Light

[@hocktooey]

I wish I could hear what Michael Schreyach had to say. I wonder if the naiveté Nemerov talks about is what I experience in front of my favorite Hofmann paintings: empathy--and I think Hofmann writes about this feeling. It is this weirdly deep connection with his perfectly delicious colors sculpted onto a surface, plywood, canvas, or whatever. The pattern of the brush strokes and stabs or the knife cuts and swipes provokes a palpable resonance (I am thinking here of Scintillating Space)--a lot like how the timbre of a musical instrument feels within the sequential musical phrase. And then there’s this strong sense that the textures within parts of the painting are expressing something true to nature. I can feel the thickness of the textures and am attracted to that feeling. The air grows heavier as I connect with it. It really is quite transformative. While in the gallery I was thinking about Michael Polan’s book from last year about psychoactive drugs and how some people have this strong sense when taking mushrooms--or acid or when meditating--of universal consciousness, of the connectedness of things, of how consciousness is external and how the human body is one type of conduit for it, or flowering blossom of it. Hofmann tunes into that for me. There is a reality he reveals that is alive and energizing. And Mr. Nemerov, I’ve heard you speak a couple of times recently and ask if art for art’s sake has any relative value to real life-especially the reality of the present moment, which I take to mean “the whole shithouse going up in flames.” And I remind you of Nabokov, whom you quote, and his comments on recognizing and savoring artistic genius: Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. Let us be proud of our being vertebrates, for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame. The brain only continues the spine: the wick really goes through the whole length of the candle. If we are not capable of enjoying that shiver, if we cannot enjoy literature, then let us give up the whole thing and concentrate on our comics, our videos, our books-of-the-week. But I think Dickens will prove stronger. (Nabokov, Lectures on Literature. 64) Hofmann proves stronger, I think.

[@janetbrodesser236]

The" presence "of a work of art is never stale to the mind of an artist, any more than an ice cube is to a physicist.

[@СашаКаретка]

Where Shreyach talk at ?

[@janetbrodesser236]

What is sterile about influences?

[@joshuaokerson9601]

I have a hans hofmann painting that I was wondering if i could show you?