as at the beach, a splash can be a very beautiful thing
Oliver said he liked Seurat because he respects the skill that takes, but he doesn’t understand why Pollock is revered when anyone could do that... Going online to find a book to give Oliver about abstract art, I found a pamphlet: What’s with Modern Art? by Frank O’Hara... In the article, O’Hara, in his role as assistant curator at MoMA, answers teenagers’ questions. The first is about what it means when an artist splashes paint on a canvas. He replies that if a person devotes effort to something like that it means that he’s serious and he’s trying to communicate something. He also says that “as at the beach, a splash can be a very beautiful thing.”
— Ada Calhoun, “Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me” (Grove Press, June 14, 2022)
