Morning : Agnes Martin

Morning 1965

Agnes Martin
Acrylic and pencil on canvas

"I was painting about happiness and bliss and they are very simple states of mind I guess. Morning is a wonderful dawn, soft and fresh.''

From Agnes Martin's obituary in The Times:

"At a glance, or from a distance, her work looks like nothing at all. Square canvases are so palely touched with colour they might almost be blank. Considered slowly and carefully and close-up, however, the whole surface comes alive. Every detail counts, as the viewer is gripped by an intricate and endlessly fascinating interplay of irregular graphite lines and thinly layered bands or strokes of paint."

...

" To the end of her days her methods and concerns remained the same. She had no studio assistants (“I don’t know what they’d do”), and her only concession to age was to reduce the size of her canvases (after 32 years) from 6ft by 6ft to 5ft by 5ft so that she could still lift and carry them herself.

Well into her eighties she was working in the studio from 8.30 to 11.30 each morning. She would then have lunch in her favourite restaurant in Taos, and read at home in the afternoon — Agatha Christie was a favourite author — before going to bed by about 8 o’clock. She never owned a television, and by the time she died had read no newspaper for 50 years.

It was the life she wanted. “I have a very quiet mind,” she said a few years ago. “I worked hard for that. It took a lot of discipline.”"