The 100 years Show

This was a program about Carmen Herrera, a minimalist cuban painter mainly working in Paris and New York during her lifetime. Despite now being 94 (in the film, now she is 102) her work has only been recognised in the last 10 or so years. 

Key Quotes 

What do you think about when your working?

"About the line, about the paper about a lot of tiny things that get bigger and bigger and then a picture comes up." 

How do you decide on a colour?

"Whether you like it or you don't, whether it does something to the other colour" 

"If you go to the basic, you can never fail", "Less is more. I do it all the time, I have something that I think is finished and I take something out and it's better"  

"It took a long time till I hit on the hard-edge thing which I love - because I like straight lines, I like angles, I like order. In this chaos that we live in I like to put some order, so that is why I guess I am a hard-edge painter and a geometric painter" 

What is it that drives you about this kind of painting?

"If I could do things with words I wouldn't do them in the painting, I would tell you.", "Usually artists are not the best people to talk about art, I think it's a great mistake. You cannot talk about art, you have to art about art then you know something." 

"There's a lot of vibrancy, a lot of life and almost a spiritual quality to that work" (name of girl)

"The series of black and white paintings that she made in Paris prior to return to the US actually prefigure things that were to come later within New York within painting. You get a little optical thing happening because of the difference between black and white, suddenly the space in which the painting is shown is called into question" (Nigel Prince, Curator)

"She is at that moment in time dealing with the physical structure of the painting, so that the painting is becoming an object"

How is this relevant? 

Firstly I just really enjoy the way she talks about her work, and I think there is a definite connection to be formed between her approach to both colour and composition, and theories of visual perception or even gestalt psychology I have been researching so far within my project. I would like to research more into other artists that created similar work to her during this period (that were mentioned in the documentary), as well as those that would have influenced her work - such as: Bauhaus, Russian Suprematism, Ellsworth Kelly, Leon Polk Smith, Frank Stella & Lyga Clark.