Between the Gillian Ayres show at the Castlefield Gallery on Deansgate and Manchester in 1989 and the Joan Mitchell show at Hauser and Wirth around 2006, I could not choose between as seminal moments in  my life.  Both are profound touchstones.  The Gillian Ayres show helped light the touch paper for a love affair with painting, the Joan Mitchell show poured buckets of lighter fluid on the still burning but by then more subdued flames.  I am currently allowing myself to revel in this love in an unapologetic way, like I did when I was 19, and it feels good.

You can see the paintings of Clare Price here http://www.clareprice.com

‘This drawing by Louise Bourgeois from 1950 has long been a favorite of mine.  In a body of work that spans the better half of the 20th century into the 21st, incorporating monumental sculpture and installation, the pursuit of “drawing” as an independent aesthetic endeavor is consistently important to Bourgeois.  I know from the artist’s own commentary that this particular drawing was inspired by a childhood memory of the Creuse region in Southern France.  

For me, the drawing is both landscape and body, a heaving, pulsing accumulation of strokes that suggests both a sense of expansive discovery and the immediacy of an idiosyncratic touch.  There is a meditative faith in the rocking creation of form, as if the peaks and waves could only be found through the experience of making the drawing.  I find all this steady, deliberate activity in the midst of the drawing’s boundless sea to be deeply reassuring.  

 

Scale inside the drawing seems to simultaneously broaden and telescope.  I am looking at something both far and close, a survey of distant mountains or some eccentric combed hairdo.  Another provocative landscape/body fluctuation.  Bourgeois has described her memory of the region as “deserted and frozen, ungrateful and poor.”  I do get that from the drawing, but I also find the rhythmic building of form to be almost silly and celebratory in its persistence toward grand culmination that is not so grand - and the inevitable release of that form into a downhill let-down. 

 

Hard for me to think of this drawing without making a connection to another favorite of mine: “Rocks and Trees, Montmajor” by Vincent Van Gogh - 1888.  The autonomy of the mark and its wandering, almost flat-footed search for meaning is a quality which resonates in both works.  Repetition as a means toward the recognition of variation and incident is another strategy in common.  I have said of my own work that it is all just an excuse to get from here to there.  By “all”  I mean, drawing, language, the interaction of color, among other things.  I like being shown how to go from here to there in these drawings, with the basic diagram of the route always available, readable but full of change and movement.  I recognize the mark and I can feel it breathing’.