Mark Bradford on Clyfford Still

To use the whole social fabric of our society as a point of departure for abstraction reanimates it, dusts it off.

My name is Mark Bradford and I’m an abstract painter.

Being an abstract painter, I am fascinated by that 1950s moment in New York when Abstract Expressionism began. Clyfford Still pushes back against intimacy. It’s like it’s big, it’s not easel painting that was containable and something you snuggle up around and get cozy.

When I see a mark that’s being repeated almost obsessively I always ask myself, “What is he trying to get to?” There’s a conversation that he’s having with that surface and with himself, and probably art history and his peers. He’s leaving little markers, guideposts, for us. And as an abstract painter I do the same thing: I leave bits of the conversation.

The canvas itself almost becomes a color, like a pigment. It doesn’t feel as if it’s just a background. There’s an agitation at the edges and it feels almost as if the whole surface was torn away.

You can tell that it was palette knife and he labored. I’m amazed at how he's able to control the temperature emotionally. It doesn’t look like madness. He ground all of his own pigments, determining the vibrancy and the hue and the texture. He was able to take a color that’s kind of loaded and hot, like a red, reduce it down. And what I find fascinating is specifically his use of blacks. Black was his favorite color. In the fifties! I mean, he is like, “I’m a 1950s white male and black is not terrifying, it’s not threatening, and I’m going to use it constantly, in large areas of work. And I’m gonna talk about the color.” You don’t know if he was being political. But at the same time modernism was going on, the Civil Rights Movement was going on. My God, it was around the same time as Emmett Till! I mean, how can you separate that from the baggage?

Is it inherently abstract? Maybe not. It goes back to the artist’s intent, and Clyfford Still imposed a lot of rules on where and how his work was to be displayed. It couldn’t travel and it couldn’t be loaned. He is like the ultimate stage mother, he is controlling it even from the grave. I suppose I’m the opposite of that. I would be the mother that, once the child leaves the house, is like, "good luck and God be with you." You gotta let a kid go. It’s just part of life.

The artist taking responsibility and control over his own destiny is something that I really respect, but you know that there’s always going to be slippage. As a twenty-first-century, 2015, African-American artist, when I look back at Abstract Expressionism, I get the politics, I get the problems, I get the theories, I can read his manifestos, but I think that there’s other ways of looking through abstraction. To use the whole social fabric of our society as a point of departure for abstraction reanimates it, dusts it off. Oh, it becomes really interesting to me, and supercharged. I just find that chilling and amazing.