The Menil Collection’s Post

Transcript

Artist Ruth Asawa practice drawing daily. It was the center of gravity in our creative journey and an integral part of a life as an artist and educator. Drawing with both essential and generative and exercise she like into scales for musicians. Right impulse to draw was about more than mere pleasure. She draw to sea, to know, to record, to heal, and to nurture the wild around her, as well as to imagine what might exist beyond the visible. As our was an American artist of Japanese descent with European based artistic training, she enrolled at Black Mountain College and Experimental Liberal Arts School outside of Asheville, NC where she studied under the former Bauhaus professor Josef Albers and the architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller. No, no gain existence. This school had a deep impact on a generation of creativity individuals. In our classes, she explored color combinations and the play of positive and negative space as Howard learned people falling as a child. And she returned to the arts at Black Mountain College, pushing the structural and visible possibilities of paper. She continued making paper falls in the coming years, exploring color, contrast, dimensionality and movement. For her paper became a material that she used to construct 3 dimensional drawings. The artist was resourceful. And recognize the aesthetic potential in found objects. She used stamps found while working in a summer job in the laundry room to make striking graphic compositions, and later she's objects like potatoes and backpedals as drawing implements, creating abstract forms and arrangements. Perhaps the best known body of work as ours form within a form root wire sculptures. For the artist, working with wire was a natural extension of drawing on paper, transferring the line of ink. Into metal and moving it into space. Intrigued by the growth pattern she observed in nature as our created layered and radiating compositions inspired by tree rings, flowers and vegetables from a garden, one generative drawing challenge that Ozawa faced was to portrait the desert plants branching forms. She struggled to draw the plant in two dimensions and therefore turned to sculpture to better understand its structure, beginning with a bundle of wire. The center and dividing it. As she worked outwards, she untangled the plants. Complexities. She then turned back to the sheet, creating a series of related drawings. As I explained, I tried to explore the total capacity of materials and techniques. Often that takes me where I would not otherwise go. In our in paintings, she embraced the potential of her chosen materials, finding the forms of gnarled trees in our splatters and pools of ink, drawing with a means not only to connect with nature for the artists, but also to weave a sense of community. The San Francisco Bay Area with Ruth Asawa's home for over 60 years. She was deeply invested in her community, her family, friends and colleagues, drawing with a through line in our practice, the connective tissue across our life and work as an artist, educator and community leader.