a total embrace
What really counts is to strip the soul naked.
Painting is made as we make love;
a total embrace, prudence thrown to the wind,
nothing held back.
– Joan Miró
Paysage [Landscape] 1927
oil on canvas 129.9 x 195.5
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
One of the most striking features of Paysage [Landscape] is the intense colour with sparing use of images. “This painting is about air and space and nothingness. When you describe it in words, you say the top half is dark blue and the bottom half is red and there is a yellow thing and an oval thing on a string, but this doesn’t actually describe the air of mystery and intensity of the experience you get with this work. There is all the ambiguity, as well as the purity and beauty of the colour, which sets up your reaction to it.”
– Christine Dixon, senior curator of international painting and sculpture at the NGA, Canberra.
Miró was inspired by the countryside around Montroig, a small village south of Barcelona, where he spent his summers on the family farm.
I was very aware of wide, empty spaces punctuated by one tiny object. I was particularly inspired by Cornudella, near Montroig, where my grandfather came from. The soil is so incredibly red. In my painting there are often tiny forms in vast empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains; everything that has been stripped bare has always impressed me.
– Joan Miró
1893 – 1983
Source: The Weekend Australian Review, Public Works, by Bronwyn Watson July 3-4 2010
Joan Miró: 1893-1983
– Janis Mink
the awakened eye 