Franz Kline's Process Explained

For more than a year, I've been on a Franz Kline (b.1910 d.1962) kick. I feel like I've honed in on "my style" of abstract through studying his works. His style meshes well with my preferred Asian brush-stroke ink paintings. Interestingly, as he struggled to find his style back in NYC hanging out with the other Midcentury abstract expressionists, his close friend, DeKooning, helped inspire him to find abstract design inspiration from distorting his sketches on a wall via a projector. What a great idea. So far, I've been doing art inspired by Kline on 10x10 paper applied to wooden tiles, but I will be making larger ones on both paper and canvas in the near future.

Last November, I was visiting with a SantaFe gallery manager over a piece that looked to be inspired by Kline AND Asian calligraphy. This particular gallery had a sympathy for Midcentury style abstract expressionism. Its manager told me he liked Kline's black and white works, but not his later colorful works. To which I responded that "I do like his colorful works just as much." I like to say that if I'm not working with strong contrasts like black and white, I prefer the opposite... fauvist colors.

Philosophically, I believe in paring down to core truths. Simplifying, if you will. Minimalism. If that isn't representative of Kline's style, I don't know what is.



Here's an example of one of my 10x10's...

[Etsy Link]
Two years ago, I took a course through the Art Student's League of Denver from Mamiko Ikeda to learn Japanese calligraphy. She is a lovely person, the daughter of a mother who was a regional expert teacher of Japanese calligraphy in Japan. Mamiko's skills are employed by the Denver Art Museum and others. She showed us the lineage of the characters and the variations according to their derivations. I learned that there is great pride and also self-discipline involved in learning this skill, as the strokes must be practiced literally thousands of times before considered perfect in the traditional sense. I also learned that, while I'm glad I took the class, that kind of art is not for me. Let me take off on the abstract form inspired by their beautiful art of calligraphy. Like Kline.

Here is a link to an article from the Tate on the debate about Kline's work representing Japanese calligraphy.
And here is a link to many works by Kline on Artnet.