King, from Series...

Comment

Comment by Resident Curator on July 9, 2011 at 7:20am

It's really beautiful work.  I'm happy that you appreciated my read on the forms.

Comment by Bettina on July 9, 2011 at 1:59am

Thank you, Resident Curator, for your comment. I agree with the suggestions of maintaining the ambiguity and use more the contrast instead of pleasure producing color. Your reading is impressive, the empty garment asociation, the "universal template", the painting as a constructive process... Thank you for taking the time to go beyond the obvious.

Comment by Resident Curator on July 8, 2011 at 8:05pm

Curator’s Comment:

 

I thoroughly respond to your gestural handling of deep earth tones and highly textured surfaces.  The ambiguity of forms lends a shrouded, mysterious haze, as one can make out images suggestive of garments. I particularly like the more symbolic use of the crown in this piece.  It has a ceremonial quality that may have been sought in some of the vestment like shapes in your other work, but carries specific cultural or edifying significance.  As a purely formal shape the cleaving of bilateral halves and open bottom leads the eye up and through the picture plane, following the faint dotted lines.  The small diamond shapes and arrows add literal points of reference, as if constructing the crown from a universal template.  The numerical ‘18’ in the central area provides a textual element that fixes the strong diagonal marking and allow the colors to swim around its central axis. I don’t know that it has any other importance.

I also enjoy your more ambiguous and abstract untitled works, for very different reasons.  The works that have more contrast and light have the same fluid and confident organic figuration, but the more saturated orange and blues provide a pleasurable, if less enigmatic certainty.