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I encountered Gorky when I applied for a job
in the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, and saw throughout the galleries
this unbelievable blaze of color. I knew there was a language there; I couldn’t work out what the language was,
but knowing that I wanted to. Water of the Flowery Mill was painted by Gorky in Connecticut, during a four-year span where he
came into his own as an artist. One of the things that Gorky really loved doing was lying face down in the grass and looking at
the tiny micro world that exists underneath. Within the composition you
begin to make out
biomorphic forms that are limned by bright scarlets and oranges.
Thinned-out oil paint areas, where Gorky is describing
flowers,
plants, weeds,
even birds
and insects. The arch
of a bridge or perhaps an aspect
of the mill in the process of
disintegrating. He makes the colors bleed into each other. Extraordinary kind of
life that is in the process of procreation.
Connecticut was very reminiscent of the fields around his home village in Armenia. Gorky’s family was subject to the
pogrom in 1915, an enormously traumatic part of Gorky’s childhood.
This painting describes Gorky’s own persona.
Underneath the efflorescence of life and
its ability to induce joy through color, it has these very dark passages
where the forms start hardening, where there is a
suggestion of an undertow.
I have managed to
put an alphabet to the unknowingness of that first encounter.
Gorky created a language that really
engaged with the history of
painting. It lit something in me that made me resolved, and that
doesn’t often happen in one’s life, and Gorky defined that path.