Backstroke Dreams

Comment

Comment by Resident Curator on September 15, 2012 at 8:04pm

Curator’s Comment:  

 

I’m very intrigued by this image, as it has a raw, unfiltered quality that lays bare the selective process of painting.  For all of the glossy digital manipulation that removes the artists’ hand and evidence of decision making, Backstroke Dreams pulls the viewer into the very nature of its construction. The tiled pool seems to be built of brushy dabs of watercolor pigment, alternating with photographically enhanced water barriers, and of course a perfect blue-cloud sky.  The swimmer is the least developed in terms of color media and texture.  Her central placement doesn’t obfuscate her black and white minimal contours, but she reaches up languidly from her pose as if to capture the color in her surrounds.  The lanes of water also materialize into separate, slightly shifting aqueous bands because of media and technique- another trick of the eye as wet into wet watercolor methods make way for digital detail.  And yet the distinctive pieces blend effortlessly.  We move quickly through these faintly wavering realities and assemble an image that in its totality is about movement, color and existing in a finite space.   The second piece entitled Heading Through Change is also evocative in its direct manipulation of transparency and semi-opaque figures. But here the transitions are more overt, and the figure-ground relationship is more defined.  I also find it curious that the figures seem to be lined up, waiting for an event.  It may be that they’re in the process of becoming.