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HELEN LUNDEBERG

September 1974

Odilon Redon, writing about his graphic work, said that he wished to put "the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible". In one sense, the painter can hardly do otherwise, for the visual elements of a painting inevitably create some kind of subjective entity: calm or violent, ordered or confused, pleasing or disagreeable, majestic or trivial, to name only a few alternatives. If Giotto's paintings of Biblical subjects seem more religious than Baroque treatments of the same subjects, it is because the pictorial structures both reflect and induce attitudes: reverent on one hand, worldly on the other. 

Although I have not considered myself a "programmatic" painter since my early as a Postsurrealist, my conscious intention, in all my work, has been to weld inextricably its objective and subjective aspects. Most of my early Postsurrealist paintings presented "idea-entities" through arrangements of depicted forms, some visual-perceptive, some conceptive or diagrammatic; contemplation of the sequence of meanings or associations attached to these forms created the pictorial aesthetic. Since about 1942 my work has been concerned, in varying modes of pictorial structure and various degrees of representation and abstraction, with the effort to embody, and to evoke, states of mind, moods and emotions. This, of course, is an extension of another aspect of Postsurrealism - the "mood-entity" I mentioned in a 1934 brochure titled, significantly, "A New Classicism". 

I have never been able to understand why one should have to choose between the formal and the expressive, if one cares