Blank Slate

You want to interpret this, don’t you?  It’s clearly something.  Your first impulse is to see something in the middle that is set on a black background.  It could be a monument with inscriptions.  It could be a building with wobbly sides.  You can keep on guessing, but whatever it is, it’s big.  This interpretation is odd, since there’s nothing in the image to compare it to, that would establish size.

You may even find this “structure” vaguely threatening.  But if your eyes drift to the edges of the painting, all illusion-bets are off.  At the edges you can see that what you’re looking at is paint brushed on a flat surface.  So you sigh with relief.  But then your attention immediately drifts back to “the thing” in the middle and the puzzle starts all over again.

If that weren’t enough, you can clearly see that the thing in the middle is not painted on top of the black, but the black impinges on the thing.  Therefore, you can’t really see this thing as the foreground, as the object of the painting.  Now what?  Can you call the black the foreground?  Oh, but that would be  so counter-intuitive.  Yes, indeed.  There’s no final answer.  That’s why you’re captivated by this painting.

Karen Gerrard, acrylic on canvas, 40” x 30”

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2017/01/19/inventing-an-alphabet/

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Marching Arches

These cropped forms suggest some architectural element, with variations. Or, maybe, chair backs. In any case, something well designed, serious and possibly monumental. At the same time, unstable and meaningless. If they are structures, you can see that they lack bracing but are, nevertheless, solid. They’re grand in some way. And there are many of them, this we can infer from the cropping.
This, therefore, is a painting that at first glance suggests clarity of statement. But if you fall for its seduction, you’ll soon chase yourself in circular thinking and you end up not “getting” it at all. This is a good thing. You’re looking at art.
Painting by Harold Bauer. Oil on canvas, ~30” x 24”
Now let’s flip it horizontally. Oh, look! The flipped version seems much friendlier, more accessible. It lacks the gravitas of the original. I would not ponder this version, I would consider it “lite,” a bit decorative, merely clever.
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Does Not Make Nice

Same gloves as before (previous post), same old pot.  But what a different feeling!

While Linné’s drawing holds us with its tense composition, Gaby’s drawing grabs us emotionally.  She places the pot in the middle of the page and the gloves on left and right, giving us a rational anchor in symmetry.  Nice, thank you.  But the drawing quality itself does not make nice.  Her markmaking is frenzied. We can recognize the two objects on either side as gloves, but they might also be agitated organism.  It’s a compelling double-take, given that the glove is an analog of the hand.

Somehow she managed to make the whole thing look monumental (and I can’t quite analyze that effect), making the gloves surreal and spooky.  Notice the urgency of the deep black scribbles on either side of the pot/tower.  There’s something ominous about that background. (Maybe that’s where the illusion of monumentality comes from).

The whole page pulsates.   I keep looking at this page, drawn into its life.

The drawing, about 12” x 14”, was done in Aquarellable Pencil on gloss paper.

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Pile of Pots: Drawing by Austin P.

To follow the thread, go back to posts for May 22, 23, and 24.  The representational drawing by In Young (May 22) will show you what the still life looked like.  Now, here we have Austin’s take.  Austin is an architecture student.  Her charcoal pencil always produces clearly delineated forms defining intensely dark masses.  No exception here.  These dark shapes manage to loom on the page like a didactic memorial, perhaps a war memorial.  (I was reminded of Henry Moore and others in the class also made that connection.)

She achieves this effect because 1) the forms are barely recognizable as pottery and 2) there is no reference to a familiar object that could serve to establish a sense of scale.  In other words, Austin looked at those ordinary pots on the studio table and used them as a point of departure for a drawing of the kind of monumental forms that she produced in all the classes, even when the subject was a vase with flowers.

This is the fourth drawing in a series of seven, titled “Pile of Pots.”

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