Winter is For Minimalists

Winter is for Minimalists

There are moments in a good Minnesota winter where I feel like I am in an “either/or” state of mind. I suppose it’s a bit melodramatic but I think of it as an irreducible moment—I’m either alive or I’m not. 

When I step outside, it seems like I’m on some other planet. One of those inhospitable places that would get the robot yelling “Warning Will Robinson!”  Winter is the only season that can kill without the noise and bother of a storm. You just fall asleep and freeze. Winter is all about protection and self-preservation. 

Other times a light, grayish white envelopes the landscape. Death is still over the hill but the landscape could be a gallery in New York City. Cool, blinding white with subtle inflections marking the edge of a door or the bottom of the wall. Floors icy and shiny above a hovering monetized silence. I am walking into a Robert Ryman painting. Winter is a season for minimalists—it buzzes with a presence, subtle inflections, repetition, and systems. 

Snowdrifts are hardened remnants of the ephemeral mysterious wandering ways of the wind. The delicate and complex variations of snowflakes repeat a theme over and over, one on top of the other, until you are buried in cool whiteness.     

Point, 1968 

Robert Ryman

A painting by Ryman is a statement of inflection. Like winter, slight variations in tone and color temperature become pronounced due to the lack of contrast; a single stick on the hardened white snow, distinctive by what is not there rather than what is. Like the period on the end of a sentence, Minimalism—the art movement—was the end of modernism. And afterward, all hell broke loose. 

Footsteps, in other seasons ignored, crunch during winter. Each step produces a negative concave impression of my boots—negative spaces—lined up extending to a crisp horizon.

Either/or is a mental place that describes more of a state of mind than a choice.  Minimalism is one of my favorite art movements, probably because it reminds me so much of winter. Minimalism, like the cold of winter, tends to force this either/or condition on my thinking. It is either/or and nothing in between. Other art movements are conditional; maybe there is some love or politics floating around, something about beauty or history, perhaps a bit of formalism or color theory tossed in. These are all parts of other seasons, not the either/or of winter. 

Winter for the rural American contemporary artist is all about paring things down to the minimal: We are dead or we are alive.  That is the either/or of art.