Research paper #1 feedback

Premonitions of fall.
Simcha, my new dog




Got feedback from Laurel (my advisor) today on my first research paper. Thumbs up.

Here are some points:

-Continue to mine the topic of what it means to be making abstract expressionist paintings in 2009.
-The premise for the UCLA Hammer show, "Oranges and Sardines" is based on dialogue among contemporary abstract painters and their influences.
-Read Jonathan Lethem's essay "The Ecstasy of Influence: a Plagiarism"(Harper's, Feb 2007, 59-71.

I've read "Oranges and Sardines", and will pull it out again this evening.
I downloaded Lethem's article and I'm reading it right after I post.

The title of the exhibit is based on a poem by Frank O'Hara, "Why I Am Not A Painter".

I 'fessed to Laurel that I am really in some kind of funky crisis now, proposed some ideas for breaking out...

Tonight I'm spending 1-2 hours reading, the rest of the evening painting.

Here is the Frank O'Hara poem (I'll bet I'm breaking copywrite...so this may disappear after I do some looking around).
You can see Michael Goldberg's work (the painter who painted "Sardines") here.




Michael Goldberg, Sardines, 1955. National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.



Why I Am Not a Painter
by Frank O'Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

Frank O’Hara, “Why I Am Not a Painter” from The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Copyright 1971 by Mauren Granville-Smith, Administratrix of the Estate of Frank O'Hara. Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc, www.randomhouse.com/category/poetry/.

Source: The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara (1995)