HOMAGE TO CLYFFORD STILL

For a many years I’ve been wowed by the work of Clyfford Still who was born in North Dakota in 1903 and spent most of his life on the West Coast rather than in the East Coast artist communities. Art historians for the next few centuries will be trying to decide which of the abstract expressionists of the 20th century should be considered the father of the movement. With a strong nod to Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline, I’d finally cast my vote for Still. By 1940 he had left representational painting inspired by country people and farm buildings and machinery and had gone almost exclusively to abstraction. I think of him often because a couple of varieties of eucalyptus trees look as if Clyfford had designed them. I found my photographs for today as I walked from the bus stop at Fifth and Laurel Streets to my volunteer work at the Museum of Photographic Arts.

Still died in 1980 thirty years before somebody finally got around to building a museum for his life’s work. A couple of weeks ago the Clyfford Still Museum opened in Denver. I’ll make a special trip there sometime soon.