At the Smithsonian American Art Museum, view:
John E. Dowell, Jr., Letter to My Betty II, 1970, color lithograph on paper, sheet: 15 1⁄8 x 12 in. (38.3 x 30.5 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase, 1971.305
I froze up in my writing for this blog because I wasn’t feeling great or good. I was also plagued by the thing I’m trying to get over. This feeling that to write about art means that I must come up with something no one has every said or thought about art to say anything at all. This blog isn’t that. I’m not that. I’m a person who likes to look at art and likes to write, and that’s all this blog needs to be. I’m trying to convince myself. To let myself simpy be. So the exercise continues.
Dowell’s Letter to My Betty II drew my attention because I’ve been thinking of the letters I wish I wrote to friends but don’t carve the time out to. But this past month, my letters would have looked more like this than anything else. A bunch of crossed out words, things I didn’t think I should put in writing and send in the mail. A desire to be alone but not alone, a feeling that I relate to letter writing. A relationship from a comfortable distance.
This one I really wish I could see in person. The layers of color and the bright doodles that rise up from the lake of lines. As always, I need someone to explain the process of lithography to me. Printmaking processes are always so deceptively simple in appearance, or maybe it’s because I can’t think in the way they must to layer. The process is an art in itself.
whyever 