Missing
Posted: June 18, 2012 Filed under: Galleries, Private Collections | Tags: art, art blog, beauty, encaustic, I hate Mondays, inspiration, landscape, life, looking, missing, Missing Cloud, Russian Contemporary art, Slava Tch 3 Comments
Yes, I am missing a cloud today. I’ve looked for it in several places, the usual ones. But not to be found.
Like I look for my life on a Monday morning, in all the usual places, sometimes not to be found. And I’m jealous of these white houses standing so upright and sure. Confident in themselves and their plans. Smug-happy they made the right decisions. Strutting out red-roofed optimism.
They do not lean in, searching. To find that thing they are missing, the white cloud. But the rest of the painting does. The lake and the horizon pinch together in the middle, pull the hills and trees inward, a landscape search party. Bowed around the center.
Ah here it is. The cloud, blithe floating on the convex lake, off-center. Taking a break. Tired of holding up the sky. Gonna leave that job to the others. Maybe it should have been fog in the first place.
But the land does not release its searching tension. The charcoal sailboat still tilts. Maybe we have found what we were looking for, maybe we haven’t. Here the joy is in the looking.
Handkerchief amoré
Posted: March 9, 2012 Filed under: Galleries | Tags: abstract expressionism, Allison Miller, contemporary art, encaustic, handkerchief, love, pattern Leave a comment
Allison Miller, Noren, Susan Inglett Gallery, New York, New York
Ahh. . . now here we are in the land of pure abstraction, not a representational figure in sight, yet Allison Miller uses pattern to create a wafting, billowy painting that draws your eye back and forth in the breeze. Like a gossamer handkerchief on a clothes line, or a myriad flags waving under a quilted sky.
The use of pattern here is still as playful and engaging as in the last two paintings we touched. If you look closely, the patterns actually create the painting and its depths. Not utilitarian and controlled, bowing to the artists bidding. They take on a life of thier own, stacking like those overhead transparencies our teachers used to use, laid one on top of the other. She accomplishes this transparent depth by working in a medium called encaustic, hot wax mixed with pigment and then applied.
Notice the background layer, a collage of quilted colors that melt and merge in liquidy squares. These draw your eye deep into the painting. Next look at the gossamer overlay of filmy blue- the squigges dance on top. These seem to float and wriggle right before your eyes. What to do with the squiggles in orange diamonds, do they belong to the quilted background or the breezy foreground, or a no-man’s-land midground?
The squiggles remind me of flags, and I imagine she is bidding “ciao” to her Italian (or Hungarian) lover. I still can’t get the handkerchief impression out of my head– but that could be the muffled call of a forgotten one given to me by a long ago lover, tucked back in my lingerie drawer. Does she long for that vibrant happiness? Maybe she just misses the kick-ass gelato.
igetitart 