Beauty Is The Mystery Of Life

Agnes Martin led her life with a positive outlook. She saw the beauty in every possible thing.

'“When I think of art I think of beauty.

Beauty is the mystery of life.

It is not in the eye it is in the mind.

In our minds there is awareness of perfection.”

“I believe in living above the line,”

she said in a 2002 interview, two years before her death.

“Above the line is happiness and love… below the line is all sadness and destruction and unhappiness.

And I don’t go down below the line for anything.”

With My Back to the World. Its title encapsulates her worldview—that art sits outside of the cares and corruption of the world—and her hermetic lifestyle.

She wanted to envelop viewers within her vision, in this case, pastel bands of blue, peach, and yellow.

The banded canvases may at first appear to be identical, but with time, attention, and a closer look, their many small variations reveal themselves.

Martin was in her mid-80s and residing in an assisted living facility when she made this work.

Though she remained strong and lucid, she reduced the size of her larger canvases to 60 x 60 inches so that she could handle them more easily.

“The silence on the floor of my house

Is all the questions and all the answers that have been known in this world

The sentimental furniture threatens the peace

The reflection of a sunset speaks loudly of days”

Agnes Martin was both an intellectual and a highly emotional being,

a woman who synthesized the essences of two world-changing movements

—Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism—

and who, from a tortured life, beset by schizophrenia, managed to derive a philosophy, amounting almost to a gospel, of happiness.

One close acquaintance remembered her saying to them, “I have no friends, and you’re one of them.”

No matter what, there is joy.

Draw the line,

SEE the beauty,

FEEL, HEAR, THINK,

do.