Walk on a rainbow trail;
walk on a trail of song,
and all about you will be beauty.
There is a way out of every dark mist,
over a rainbow trail.
-- Robert Motherwell
I came across this quote yesterday and started putting it together with an image while wondering just what it means to walk a rainbow trail. I started in a "normal" fashion overlaying rainbows on path images ... which just looked stupid. Thinking I was using the wrong path, I tried three times before giving up and just playing around with shapes. I almost laughed out loud when this shape literally jumped outside the box.
Here's more information about Motherwell, whose words speak louder to me than does his art.
“To end up with a canvas that is no less beautiful than the empty canvas is to begin with.”
In 1940, a young painter named Robert Motherwell came to New York City and joined a group of artists — including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Franz Kline — who set out to change the face of American painting. These painters renounced the prevalent American style, believing its realism depicted only the surface of American life. Their interest was in exploring the deeper sense of reality beyond the recognizable image. Influenced by the Surrealists, many of whom had emigrated from Europe to New York, the Abstract Expressionists sought to create essential images that revealed emotional truth and authenticity of feeling.
Robert Motherwell was the youngest and most prolific of the group. Born in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1915, Motherwell first hoped to be a philosopher. His studies at Stanford and Harvard brought him into contact with the great American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who first challenged him with the notion of abstraction. What he took from Whitehead was the sense that abstraction was the process of peeling away the inessential and presenting the necessary. After moving to New York and becoming acquainted with a number of artists, Motherwell recognized in them similar desires. (From PBS.org article.)
