Spencer Alley: Mid-Nineties Prints by Ian McKeever

Friday, August 3, 2018

Mid-Nineties Prints by Ian McKeever

Ian McKeever
Print A Version I
1997
woodcut
Tate Gallery

Ian McKeever
Print B Version IV
1997
woodcut
Tate Gallery

Ian McKeever
Print C Version VII
1997
woodcut
Tate Gallery

"An abstract painter entering a room where a mathematician has demonstrated a theorem on the blackboard is charmed by the diagrams and formulas. He scarcely understands what they represent; the correctness or falsity of the argument doesn't concern him. But the geometrical figures and writing in white on black appeal to him as surprising forms – they issue from an individual hand and announce in their sureness and flow the elation of advancing thought. For the mathematician his diagram is merely a practical aid, an illustration of concepts; it doesn't matter to him whether it is done in white or yellow chalk, whether the lines are thick or thin, perfectly smooth or broken, whether the whole is large or small, at the side or center of the board – all that is accidental and the meaning would be the same if the diagram were upside down or drawn by another hand. But for the artist, it is precisely these qualities that count; small changes in the inflection of a line would produce as significant an effect for his eye as the change in a phrase in the statement of a theorem would produce in the logical argument of its proof. . . . This eye, which is the painter's eye, feels the so-called abstract line with an innocent and deep response that pervades the whole being. I cannot do better than to read to you some words written from the sensibility to uninterrupted forms by an American over fifty years ago, before abstract art arose. "How does the straight line feel? It feels, as I suppose it looks, straight – a dull thought drawn out endlessly. It is unstraight lines, or many straight and curved lines together, that are eloquent to the touch. They appear and disappear, are now deep, now shallow, now broken off or lengthened or swelling. They rise and sink beneath my fingers, they are full of sudden starts and pauses, and their variety is inexhaustible and wonderful." From the reference to touch some of you have guessed, I'm sure, the source of these words. The author is a blind woman, Helen Keller. Her sensitiveness shames us whose open eyes fail to grasp these qualities of form."

– Meyer Schapiro, from his lecture On the Humanity of Abstract Painting printed in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1960