Green Tilt, 2009, egg tempera on panel, 10 x 24 inchesWorking on this painting, which is now finished, has been an interesting process for me. One reason is the large role texture has in this work, which I wrote about in a previous post; another is its quality of light. I've always loved the way sunlight plays across surfaces, adding color variations and compositional elements from shadow shapes. But when I saw this motif, there was no sunlight; there was simply color, in big shapes, balanced one against the other, and I felt strongly attracted to the image. I feel that there's a believable sense of light in this work, even if not direct sunlight. Is the color more insistently itself without light and shadow? is the painting more abstract? I don't really know, but having done this painting, I'm now tempted to paint more images without brilliant light illuminating them.
the surface texture/ rust makes it look cubist, but the color saturations certainly AREN"T cubist, so viewer looks again: what IS this? sure, a composition with direct reality reference, but it is framed in such a way that the whole disappears forcing a new whole to assemble itself, which it does.
ReplyDeleteThanks, rapp, this is what I'd hoped would happen: the painting creates its own context.
ReplyDeleteI forgot to mention in the post about the inclusion of the small gray bolt on the right; it adds a bit of mundane reality, but I felt I needed it to pin down, almost literally, the shapes; to bring the image back to a reminder of origins; also to add a small exclamation point to the whole. The image didn't look right without it.
... a bolt that has the same function as an eye.
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