Given my interest in calligraphic mark-making you can probably see what attracted me to these works by Brice Marden at Gagosian in Burlington Arcade, London.
Marden was influenced by Chinese calligraphy and made the original marks with sticks. His inspiration for this series was a Song dynasty verse, “Seven-character Poem (besotted by Flower Vapours)” by 11th century poet Huang T’ing-chien.
He retained the visual structure of 5 vertical characters and 6 horizontal characters making a total of 30 elements.
The etchings, produced with master printmaker Jennifer Melby and the photographure with printmaker Lothar Osterburg retain the immediacy of his ink drawing.
Each print is domestic in scale at around 50 x 50cm in size.
I see the doodling lines almost as neural connections between the characters.
Below is one of the original Letters of Gratitude which he had made as tokens of appreciation for the help received during the preparation of his MOMA retrospective in 2007.
