The Motherwell Estate by Lisa Golightly Braden

“In all painting, sculpture, all music, all words, all singing, one feels the human hand, the human eye, the human touch, and the tone of voice, the human estimating of weight and whiteness and airiness and darkness and massiveness and solidity and etherealism and concreteness… Everything that is in a human being, working, something has to come out…”  From Barbara Flug Colin’s interview with Robert Motherwell in 1982, from Evergreen Review, issue # 122.

I picture him traversing the space     what had once been rooms now wiped out
He mirrors the experience of walking a field     one splashed with varying intensities of sun and shadow
He rains with a rush of muddy Grey water     suns himself in a boat-like shape of Ochre
Motherwell’s sun is dead White    in contrast to this large White space
Motherwell passes through staggered columns      two are Grey     one is Black
Splashed out ahead of him are half a dozen rectangles     swept with scabrous bristles grazing unbleached Ivory and Titanium White
Things grow indoors     in disused spaces
Motherwell’s acreage is sectioned     rust stains of chicken wire constitute marks on the floor where rooms used to exist
He holds the house painter’s brush and works to the scale of labor
Down on all fours     in Brown     in Ivory     in Burnt Sienna     holding a stiff brush laced with stray hairs     he makes a mammalian jacket coat of paint
Every sixty paces     a flat frame     a canvas facing up
This White painting     the size of it     hours of layering and plowing paint
Do White sands come to mind     the luxury of so much space
The full evolution of the modern aesthetic
He works abstractly but he is thinking of cows     staining canvas Brown   feeling the warmth    the temperature of an especially large animal     remembering what it was like to look into the eyes of such a creature     to stand there feeling small     enveloped in mystery     and protected

Lisa Golightly Braden holds a B.A. in Studio Art from the University of the District of Columbia and has studied at the Corcoran School of Art. She taught for several years at the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s Camp Creativity. She has exhibited her paintings in the Washington, DC area, including museum stores. Her writing has been published in Gambling the Aisle, and her visual art has appeared in Lunch Ticket, Two Hawks Quarterly, DASH Literary Journal, Grub Street Literary Magazine, and The Brooklyn Review.