The exhibition is on until the end of May www.whitechapelgallery.org

Some notes

Griselda Pollock, professor emerita at University Leeds

Discussion on the feminist challenge, and how so few women were included in art history of this period, and being excluded solely on grounds of gender. She found some critics wrote about artist-women or artists of colour, but 'dismissively applying value-laden and gendering distinctions...'.

Why is she using the term 'artist-women'? The term 'women artists' automatically implies that artists are men. I recall the same with football at last summer Euros - around the stadium was the scrolling message: it's football played by women, not women's football as if that's a different game.

Exploring Abstract Expressionism

• abstraction is not an abstracting of form and colour from an image world
• it involved sustaining a tense balance between the materially of the paint - as paint - and its capacity to evoke visual associations, or worse, arriving at an image
• abstract painting must balance itself between remaining sheer materiality (of the paint) and risk becoming metaphoric.
• it has, instead, to sustain metonym - the work registering the action of the body that made the gesture without arriving at a single meaning or remaining merely a mess of wasted paint.

This last point struck a strong chord with me. I often find I waste paint - by painting over something that hasn't reached that point of its own expression. Balancing a willed accident and a managed event, adding paint and moving it on the canvas or scraping through or spreading and making a line.....