First - I was thinking about the Jackson Pollack movie -- that showed him
getting ready for his first big-time show. He rolled a bolt of canvas out onto
the floor -- painted it -- and then cut it up to make enough paintings for the
exhibit. So yes -- eventually he was considering the edges of each painting --
but only at the end, rather than at the beginning of the process.
Then -- I was thinking about the watercolour painters -- who often don't paint
to the edge of their paper -- so the precise edge is not determined until the
piece is framed - and sometimes it's framed by someone other than the artist.
Finally -- I've seen a lot of paintings that just seemed to have been begun
somewhere in the middle --with the image of a body, or head, or flower -- and
then eventually been worked out to the periphera.
I've also cropped a lot of paintings -- not the actual ones -- but jpg images
of them -- and haven't noticed that the precise location of the outer edge
makes all that much difference.
So yes -- I'm doubting whether Hoffman's dictum is relevant to any kind of
painting other than his own.
Same thing with his other famous dictum: "The pictorial life as a pictorial
reality results from the aggregate of two-and three-dimensional tensions: a
combination of the effect of simultaneous expansion and contraction with that
of push and pull." (i.e. -- I would say that the pictorial reality of
paintings from other schools results from much more)
***********
>Miller, you don't know much about painting or its history. All through
western art and other art, too, the artist has always paid attention to the
composition, and the composition ends at the edges of the canvas, so those
edges are crucial. Hofmann was simply reinforcing that obvious concern.
Artists who ignored their compositions were either dumb and happily forgotten
or they were dumb and became stars in the midst of decandnce. But the viewer
usually knows how the composition functions within the framing edges of the
canvas,
if they know anything at all about looking at paintings ...and not many do.
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