(227 miles NW of Minneapolis and St. Paul MN)
Downtown Fargo, North Dakota. #6 Broadway, PH: (701) 451-9111
Above right is a watercolor by Mary Theresa Menton, American (1847-1913),
in stock. Approx. 8 x 20 inches. Painted for a friend on a visit east, it is an Illinois landscape.
Mary Theresa Menton - SALE PRICE $375.00, plus shipping.
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We are located 227 miles Northwest of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul, Minnesota on Interstate 94 in downtown Fargo, North Dakota at # 6 Broadway North. Call (701) 451-9111 I sat staring, staring, staring - half lost, learning a new language or rather the same language in a different dialect. So still were the big woods where I sat, sound might not yet have been born. I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows. It is wonderful to feel the grandness of Canada in the raw. Life's an awfully lonesome affair. You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming. My mountain is dead. As soon as she has dried, I'll bury her under a decent layer of white paint. But I haven't done with the old lady; far from it! Oh, Spring! I want to go out and feel you and get inspiration. My old things seem dead. I want fresh contacts, more vital searching. Perfectly ordered disorder designed with a helter-skelter magnificence. The artist himself may not think he is religious, but if he is sincere his sincerity in itself is religion. The men resent a woman getting any honour in what they consider is essentially their field. Men painters mostly despise women painters. So I have decided to stop squirming, to throw any honour in with Canada and women. There are no words, no paints to express all this, only a beautiful dumbness in the soul, life speaking to life. There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wildness. Trees love to toss and sway; they make such happy noises. Twenty can't be expected to tolerate sixty in all things, and sixty gets bored stiff with twenty's eternal love affairs. You always feel when you look it straight in the eye that you could have put more into it, could have let yourself go and dug harder. You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming. You must be absolutely honest and true in the depicting of a totem for meaning is attached to every line. You must be most particular about detail and proportion. You will have to experiment and try things out for yourself and you will not be sure of what you are doing. That's all right, you are feeling your way into the thing. I wanted things that I couldn't at times articulate. One really beautiful wrist motion, that is synchronised with your head and heart, and you have it. It looks as if it were born in a minute. The landscapes were in my arms as I did it. The question of sex will take care of itself. There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about. We would sift through every inch of what it was that worked, or if it didn't, and wonder what was effective in it, in terms of paint, the subject matter, the size, the drawing. Whatever the medium, there is the difficulty, challenge, fascination and often productive clumsiness of learning a new method: the wonderful puzzles and problems of translating with new materials. You have to know how to use the accident, how to recognise it, how to control it, and ways to eliminate it so that the whole surface looks felt and born all at once. Anna Mary (Grandma) Roberts Moses (American 1860-1961): I look back on my life like a good day's work, it was done and I am satisfied with it. If you know somethin' well, you can always paint it but people would be better off buyin' chickens. I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart. I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore. I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for. I hate flowers. I only paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move. I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life - and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do. It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it. Marks on paper are free - free speech - press - pictures all go together I suppose. Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven't time, and to see takes time - like to have a friend takes time. One can not be an American by going about saying that one is an American. It is necessary to feel America, like America, love America and then work. Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression. It is so spontaneous. And after singing, I think the violin. Since I cannot sing, I paint. Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue - that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man's destruction is finished. The days you work are the best days. To create one's own world in any of the arts takes courage. When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not. You get whatever accomplishment you are willing to declare. ........................................................................................................................................ The Christmas reunion was snowed out, but on December 30, Stella arrived for a two-week stay. The next day, New Year's Eve, huge gray clouds swept down from Canada and burst with snow. For days, the white of the sky and the white of the ground were indistinguishable; the white creek disappeared into the white harbor and the white ocean beyond. On one of these brief days of pure light, bundled against the cold, with only a cigarette for warmth, his hands so numb he could barely hold a brush, Jackson Pollock altered the course of Western art. From Jackson Pollock: An American Saga by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith The Pollock - Krasner home and studio is maintained and at times it is possible to walk across the paint splattered floor of the studio (with special padded slippers ): Jackson Pollock studio Pretty cool
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