Richard Serra & the Plane of Painting

Henri Matisse, The Open Window, 1905

"First of all, on the surface on which I am going to paint, I draw a rectangle of whatever size I want, which I regard as an open window through which the subject to he painted is seen." 

- from Alberti's On Painting

"Aware that whenever I state this I incur a heavy silence, I point out once more that what De Pictura 1.19 maintains is that ifyou draw a rectangle then you may treat it-the drawn rectangle that is, not the entire hypothetical surface-as an open window. Of itself, the given conventionally flat format of painting, whether panel in the fifteenth century or stretched canvas now, neither entails nor implies Alberti's "window." The flat surface with edges precedes what Alberti calls a window, which is a construct, willfully imposed. 'The "window" idea, then, is a trope,:3 and a signal of the essentally fictive poetics of painting."

Untitled, 1972 (charcoal on paper)

"There was no way to make a tree. And there wasn't any Idea of "tree," not in your imagination, not in your fictive imagination, not it the reality of mark making. Because everyone seems to make up their own tool, and everyone has their own procedure.And it was totally revealing because basically, what Schuler was telling these people who were trying to get the elbow attached to the finger correctly was that there is no [one] way to draw an arm, there's no [one] way to draw a hand, there's only drawing (gerand, process) and there is only the invention of drawing."

"There is no [right] way to make a drawing, there is only drawing."

"There is only drawing and there is only the invention of drawing."

"Its up to you to make your own drawing."

Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950-51 (7' 11 3/8" x 17' 9 1/4")

The external appearance of nature as perceived by the eye does not and should not limit the parameters and possiblities of drawing. Drawing as an inventions limited only to the imagination and technical faculties of the artist.

Untitled, 1973 Paintstick and charcoal on paper; 50 x 38 in.

Vir Heroicus Sublimis in situ

Serra's reinvention of the pictorial plane surface of painting and drawing into a bodily and phenomenological space bounded on by the sensation of light on the retina but extended into the three-dimensional realm of the body and all its sensativity responsiveness to the physical space it occupies.

Drawing into architecture

Blank, 1978
(Paintstick on Belgian linen; 2 parts, each 10 ft. 1/4 in. x 10 ft. 1/4 in.)