Motherwell Totems

Elegy to the Spanish Republic

series of 150 monumental paintings

"The world could, after all, regress"

These funeral songs, these dark abstract meditations on life and death share a common horizontal and vertical structure and an essential dramatic pictorial language with whites and blacks that is as basic as the archaic, ritual art of Stonehenge, the Pacific, or African music. 

The similarities of the composition and form in all of these paintings compose a series of repetition inspired by Kierkegaard on the subject of obsession and self-repeating... on the belief of the values of accumulation and insistence... 

"Art is partly the condensing of quantity into quality"

Motherwell: What Art Holds

Wallace Stevens

Domination of Black

At night, by the fire,

The colors of the bushes

And of the fallen leaves,

Repeating themselves,

Turned in the room,

Like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind.

Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks

Came striding.

And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails

Were like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind,

In the twilight wind.

They swept over the room,

Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks

Down to the ground.

I heard them cry -- the peacocks.

Was it a cry against the twilight

Or against the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind,

Turning as the flames

Turned in the fire,

Turning as the tails of the peacocks

Turned in the loud fire,

Loud as the hemlocks

Full of the cry of the peacocks?

Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,

I saw how the planets gathered

Like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind.

I saw how the night came,

Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks

I felt afraid.

And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.