Just Not in the Mood

Comment

Comment by Resident Curator on June 19, 2011 at 8:55pm

Curator’s Comment:

Thank you for bringing your new work to my attention- it’s a fabulous piece.  I appreciate the gestural handling and unexpected cropping of the figure.  Overall your work has a dynamic gestural strength which seems to be tempered in quieter areas, such as in the little vignette of the hand and white fabric.  The diminutive figurative form on the far right adds an almost surreal detachment because of the skewed scale and proportion.  The great scale of the actual painting no doubt impacts the viewer’s response.  But even looking at the piece online I alternate between seeing the textural, energetic marks and the narrative composition.  The color palette also creates an intriguing mood, vacillating between warm fleshy tones found in what could be local color, with a layering of darker demonstrative and expressive color.  The figure-ground relationship is expanded and challenged when these brushstrokes cut arbitrarily across the softly modeled feminine form- I like this unexpected amalgamation. The title of the work adds humor to what otherwise would be a serious staging.  My initial reaction was that the title referred to the incomplete figure-i.e. Not bothering to paint the face.  But that choice looks much more calculated, and this intentional denial or concealment of identity reappears in your other work- Wading, Rapture, etc. I feel this is your strongest piece in the series as it seems to have a complete story, rather than a small passage or captured moment belonging to a larger whole.  While I like many of the others very much for similar qualities evoked in this work, Just Not in the Mood has the most sophisticated tete-a-tete with the viewer.