Nothing But Good: Jolanda Schouten / Carmen Herrera

Monday, 23 October 2023

Jolanda Schouten / Carmen Herrera

Carmen Herrera

at work

Carmen Herrera

Verde que te quiero verde (Green How I Desire You Green)

2020

large-scale mural

Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas

I only discovered Carmen Herrera's work in 2018, in a major exhibition of her work at Kunstsammlung NRW in Düsseldorf. She died last year at the age of 106. Until the end, she worked on new work every day in her flat with ruler and compasses. Herrera, born in Cuba in 1915, had to wait her whole life for her work to be recognised. At the age of 89, she sold her first work.

In 2018, Whitney Museum finally picked up her work. The actions of Guerilla Girls (https://www.guerrillagirls.com/) who have been fighting for years for gender and ethical equality in the art world, are vital, still today! Herrera was simultaneously working on her oeuvre alongside Barnett Newman (family friend), Ellsworth Kelly (her neighbour) and Frank Stella. Her work was ignored because she was a woman and her Latin American background did not help either.

In Herrera's work, colour and the straight line are the protagonists. I admire her precisely for that focus on the square millimetre where she spends a lifetime digging into the depths. What limitation and concentration!

Colour is also one of the great loves in my work. Unlike the colourfield painters like Herrera and my other great love Ellsworth Kelly, in my work nothing is tight and straight, but the lines and pools of colour move with me, bending, snapping and digesting with the life of plants. Like a logbook, I record the seasons from my tiny city garden in metres high watercolours.

Painting is something that flows in all directions, from being in the middle of a work seeing what emerges around me. I am always in direct connection with my surroundings. Everyone is welcome in my work. Starting from painting, I work on an ever-growing community embroidery project 'Let's grow flowers not walls' with people from all corners of the world (to be seen next summer in Centraal Museum Utrecht), on De Stiltetuin with plant meditations, on setting out flower bombs with 40 school classes. The antique Persian garden carpet, a sleek geometric carpet representing the four cardinal points, is a starting point.

From that love of geometry, Carmen Herrera's work touches me very much. It is complementary and therefore strongly related.

'Verde que te quiero verde', meaning 'Green How I Desire You Green'; what a title. A mural she realised in 2021 as a 105-year-old for the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas in Austin. Or 'More yellow, less green'. In the sleek, formal oeuvre of Herrera who also loves the large format, they are almost incantations, phrases you say to yourself when you are at work. The physical desire for colour as a command for the work. I recognise that and it inspires me enormously.

But most of all, I am captivated by Herrera's attitude. As a fresh graduate in the late 1980s, I heard that a career in art was not possible if you also aspired to motherhood. And perhaps also because I took my career firmly in hand myself, not waiting for galleries, museums and funds. 'My love of the line is what drives me,' Herrara says.

'You have to wait for the bus, it will always come. I had to wait for 98 years but it came!'

Jolanda Schouten, 22 October 2023