The titles of Agnes Martin paintings—Innocence, Happiness, Friendship—point to the way Agnes Martin painted abstract feelings; she painted emotion itself, “the subtle emotions we feel without cause.” Her process was one of time and repetition. I think of her as a laborer, and she certainly looks like one in photos and video footage of her in her seventies, like someone who farmed their whole life, someone who grappled with the land, the weather. She looks like one of her paintings—textural. I like to think of her working and living down at Coenties Slip, looking out at the ships. This is where the first paintings that look like Agnes Martin paintings were created, in the early 1960s, when she was about forty. Her grids emerged after twenty years of painting daily and destroying most of what she made. She’d take a knife to the paintings! I keep a list of late bloomers. Some of my favorites: Amy Clampitt, Claire-Louise Bennett, Ama Codjoe, Agnes Martin. Amina Cain is another late bloomer. In her novel Indelicacy, the narrator says, “I wanted to write about paintings, but I wasn’t seen as someone who could say something interesting about art.” Will all my years of writing without the world watching, or caring, pay off? Will I bloom? It doesn’t matter. I’m addicted to being out under the sun. “So many people don’t know what they want,” Agnes says in an interview. She lets go of each painting, once it’s done. Her job is to make art; it’s the job of others to be gallerists, museum curators, collectors. She asks her interviewer: “Do you think you’re doing what you were born to do?” Twenty years of work to get to the real work.
-Morgan English