# @drawingcenter on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/BueVXrbAoAR
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/8436695-drawingcenter-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/thumbnails/bdcb0dc16e.jpg
- **Posted:** 2019-03-01T17:24:19.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** The Drawing Center (@drawingcenter) — https://gondola.cc/drawingcenter

## Caption

Artists have a variety of methods to make their mark. Every Friday we will share a photograph of an#ArtistInAction.
.
“You’re the only one that can discover for you the meaning of anything. What it means to you. By that, I don’t mean intellectual meaning. I mean, what it means, how it makes you feel.”
.
Agnes Martin (1912 - 2004) was a Canadian-born American artist who moved to New York in 1957 where she encountered abstractionists like Ellsworth Kelly and Ad Reinhardt. Among this artist community in lower Manhattan Martin developed her signature 6 x 6 feet square canvases of penciled grids which she would paint over with a thin layer of gesso. The meditative paintings were not born of New York art philosophies of minimalism or abstract expressionism, but instead are connected to Zen Buddhism and American Transcendentalism. The inspiration to paint grids, Martin explains, came to her when she was thinking about the innocence of trees: “I thought it’s quite easy to be innocent if you’re a tree. And into my mind it became a grid...lines this way and lines that way. And I thought ‘my goodness am I supposed to paint that?’” Martin’s meticulous grids that she later painted using soft hues of watercolor express pure emotion. “I am simply painting concrete representation of abstract emotions such as innocent love, ordinary happiness. I do want an emotional response. And I paint about emotions, not about lines. The truth is that it’s not the lines that express the emotion. It’s the scale of the composition. You know, if you go into a room that has perfect scale, you feel it. And it’s the same with a painting. If the painting has perfect scale, it moves you. And you have different scale to show different emotions. It’s the space between the lines that counts.”
.
#AgnesMartin
.
Image: Photograph by Alexander Liberman, 1960. Courtesy of Getty Research Institute.

## Stats

- **Views:** 0
- **Likes:** 1,301
- **Shares:** 0
- **Comments:** 15

## Tags

agnesmartin, artistinaction

---
Copyright (c) Gondola