Bulge, hand-dyed wool on linen, 9 x 16 inches
Like the ruglet diptych Roundabout, the design for Bulge was inspired by ancient pottery at the Brooklyn Museum; you can see a series of sketches I did based on the pots here). The main ocher shape is very stretched,based on a Chinese vase (the second image here), so more comic? odd or weird? I suppose I think of it as a tongue reaching out, tasting the other shapes, with the color variations heightening the organic effect.
It's definitely strange, as you can see when it's hung with a group of my small paintings and a ruglet from 2009 called Tall Geometry. Most of my work alludes to the geometric in some form; my paintings have moved more in that direction from the free forms of the landscape. So perhaps I should push a bit more against my natural tendency and try more organic forms in my ruglets.....or maybe not. That can start a discussion about who we are as artists, and how we get to our own essential being. Over 40 years ago, when I was an art student, my professor, Philip Pearlstein told me that I had an "architectonic sensibility". It seems that he was right.
I also think you have an architectonic sensibility. this particular ruglet though doesn't move, doesn't have enough ambiguity for me, so the conversation among the forms is static. the ochre stays on top and the dark and the blue both recede, but at least in the jpg they don't interact.
ReplyDeleterappel, you may have put your finger on the discomfort of sorts I have with this piece. It may just not have come alive
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