The Drama of Concave and Convex

In this painting the red squares are in the foreground.  They appear to float on top of a background of various colors, where the blue mass reads as an integral shape and therefore dominates the other areas of this background.

At its right border (1), the blue is convex, meaning it curves outward, creating the feeling that it is pushing outward to the right. This dynamic is emphasized by the sliver of white (2) which is being worn thin by blue’s intrusion.  The white is concave. It’s a dart or arrow pointing to the right.

Stop, you may say at this point. This a colorful painting, I like it, that’s enough. You’re over-thinking this thing. These blotches of color are not going, pushing or invading anything.  They’re just sitting there.

True.  The PAINT is sitting there.  But the PAINTING is not a physical object; it’s an event in the mind.  The power of abstraction is that even though there is no identifiable object depicted in an activity, the viewer of the painting will EXPERIENCE an activity.  A drama, really, full of tension, aggression, pushing and pulling…and resolution.

We perceive the red squares as floating on top of everything because they have clear edges that do not bleed into the background anywhere; plus, there’s a suggestion of a horizon line at (3).  The painting creates the illusion of spatial depth. It teases you into thinking “landscape.”

Since the red squares are not distributed evenly, we get the sensation that they are drifting from one side of the “landscape” to the other.  From left to right? Or from right to left? My sense is that they are blowing to the right.  Try it.

The drifting reds are not round. Imagine them as red dots and the painting becomes a circus.  Imagine them petal shaped and it becomes sentimental. No-no.  The reds have to be angular to add frisson.  Your mind likes edginess.  Keeps you alert and on your toes.

Why would anybody go to the trouble of analyzing a painting at this length, you may say.  Maybe somebody needs to get out more, has too much time on her hands.  Ha,ha. I’m merely taking the time to articulate what is going on in your mind when you’re standing in front of a painting that grabs you.  At museums I often hear one person say to her companion, I like that.  Well, I’m curious why.  Someone will look at a painting for a long time.  Why?  Well, I’m suggestion they’re swept up by the drama.  The drama is in the mind.

Painting by Jane Donaldson, ~30″ x 40″

Oh, and by the way, if you flip  the painting, the drama changes…errrm, dramatically.

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Tall and Skinny “Untitled”

We don’t often see this format in painting, tall and skinny. This is the kind of proportion you are likely to get if you take a collage as your point of departure.  The collage that Elaine C. worked from was a small passage, about  1¼” x 3”,   isolated from a larger collage.  This proportion does not come in readymade frames.  No problem, there are other supports.  Artists have painted on board for centuries.  Elaine chose sanded, knot-free plywood.  I encourage this sort of departure from the “readymade” in my classes.

The colors in the collage were black and red with a snippet of green.  As she started painting, she planned on layering the paint, using under-painting.  The under-painting for the red was green.  But then the green became textural and drippy and too interesting to cover up.  The painting process took over and the original inspiration, the collage in black and red, had served its purpose and was surpassed.

The painting (48” x 20”) holds our attention because of its luminous colors, its texture and its play on the figure-ground question.

Let me expand on that last point a bit.  The question is, what’s on top of what?  The light green diamond at #1 is undoubtedly  the topmost element.  We see it that way because it is a clearly identifiable shape that we see in its entirety.  Everything else is fragmentary and our perception keeps shifting: is the green on top of the orange or the orange on top of the green?  We tend to read warm colors (orange in this case) as coming forward and cool colors (green) as receding.  But here we read the green as on top because of #5, which connects to the main orange mass (#4) and makes us read orange as the back ground.  This in itself creates tension, since we want to read the cool green as background.  But the orange keeps coming forward, not only because it’s a warm color, but also because of its shape:  it pushes its convex bays into the green at #3, #4 and #5.  Convex shapes invade and assert themselves as dominant.

But notice the little black square in the upper right at #6.  That was the last thing Elaine painted.  “It needs something up there,” she said.  Yes, it did.  And look what that little black square does.  It is an absolute—black!—and it’s the only element defined by clean straight edges.  You can’t ignore it.  Your eye keeps moving up to that corner.  After you’ve gone back and forth with the green-orange-foreground-background question for a while, that little black square throws you another mystery.  Is IT what’s behind all the color, is IT the ground?  Must be.  Since it’s cut off by the picture’s edge it looks like it’s part of something bigger.  But it’s disturbing, that the ultimate background in this painting is represented by such a tiny surface.   Disturbing, but not overwhelmingly so.  That’s just it: all this subtle tension in the midst of this luminous, glorious color and the captivating texture.

The next post will relate this painting to a 19^th century painting at the Art Institute of Chicago.

For more on working from collages, go to “collage” under Categories.

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.

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