The Lute 1964

Agnes Martin made this small drawing, The Lute, with ink on paper. Look at these horizontal lines, and that delicate grid she's overlaid on top of them. I think what Agnes Martin did with her grids was so amazing, so simple, and so not simple at all. I imagine her, in her studio, making these lines by hand, one by one. You see how the lines waver ever so slightly? I imagine she’s thinking about all the other lines she's ever made, all the other artists who've ever made lines. It's like she's in conversation with the whole history of mark-making. This isn’t just a grid; it’s a feeling, a meditation, a connection to something bigger than herself. It's like she’s building a whole world out of almost nothing.