Picture it large. It’s 48” wide.
You want to see it as a landscape, right? There’s that horizon line from the left, a third of the way down. Above that the colors are blue-ish and atmospheric. So that’s comforting. You’re on your way to an interpretation. Oh, good, you think, I can figure this out. You keep looking. What else can you latch on to, what else can you identify? Errrmmm, what’s the blue blotch, what’s the red trapezoid, what are those black strokes? Frustration sets in. No, wait, there’s that receding white brush stroke, that seems to suggest perspective. Wonderful, a sense of perspective. You keep looking for more landscape clues, but, alas, the landscape reference falls apart, it simply does not hold up. That’s your moment of release, of liberation. Exhale. Now you’re looking at the painting and enjoying it because now you’re actually seeing it.
After you stop figuring it out and you surrender to looking, you notice the little black splatters. And where are they? They are where the major forms of the composition converge. You missed them earlier. How could you miss these dots? Because they’re nothing. And yet the great big red, blue, and black shapes point to this nothing.
I, for one, love paradox. Takes my breath away.
The composition as a whole reminds me of Diebenkorn’s landscapes. Notice how his shapes converge, but on nothing.
It’s an aesthetic that goes way back to the ancient Greeks, who designed the Parthenon so that the center of the pediment facade would be an open space, not a column. We’ll get to that, later sometime.
Painting by Cassandra Buccellato, oil on canvas, ~40”x48”
Richard Diebenkorn, (1922-1993)
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artamaze by Katherine Hilden 