We’re continuing the conversation started here in post 7.9.11, where the triangle as a repeated shape was evident in the photo with the high horizon; that’s the photo with the artist sitting in the upper right quadrant of the frame. Now, as the instructor in that painting class, I’m roaming over the Evanston Art Center grounds and its environs which spread over a length of about a quarter mile. I see compositional possibilities all the time. (See the previous post, where waiting for the Purple line at Belmont got me all inspired.)
The student/artist in this case remained loyal to one spot on the dunes by the lighthouse and instead of getting bored, she looked deeper and got deeper into a (for lack of a better term) meditative state. Kathleen Q. was facing the lake, a bit of shore line, a chain link fence, sand, grasses and a vast sky. That adds up to a lot of blue, some beige and some scruffy green. Among all the students who have looked at that in the past, she is the first to see…triangles. The triangles were only on land, formed by the interaction of the fence, the sand paths and the patches of grass. She decided to work with the triangle as a repeated motif for the land shapes. I left her to make my rounds to see my other students painting the various views around the EAC. When I came back to Kathleen on the dunes there, the whole canvas had become triangulated. The sky, occupying more than half the canvas, had become crystalized as 
if by a kaleidoscope. Brilliant. The effect, of course, is abstract. This is abstraction at its best: it’s abstraction that comes out of a fresh new perception and the love of pure form.
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
artamaze by Katherine Hilden 