Girl on Grass 2013

Comment

Comment by Rebecca Ortiz on May 11, 2013 at 11:19pm

Thank you for your comment, Kristen. I enjoyed working in this style with my paintings since it gave me freedom to express movement and helped with the build up of color. I will stay with this style for future works.

Comment by Resident Curator on May 11, 2013 at 9:22pm

Curator’s Comments:

(disclaimer: Until recently, Rebecca was my student at Albright College.)

Girl on Grass is a pleasingly gentle image, while offering fervent textural manipulation.  It’s almost as if the figure is emerging, or formed from within the grassy surface.  Vertical slashes of pigment create a shifting ground, or gusty movement. The unexpected position of the head is also intriguing. Suspending the visual weight on top of the picture plane upsets the typical dynamic of a figure at rest.  In the context of some of the other more macabre images, this piece also stands out because of the psychological ambiguity.  I’m caught off guard by the unnatural coloration of the girl’s face- the yellowish tinge intimates sickness or death while being surrounding by otherwise local color.  But the more vibrant pink lips literally breathe life back into the female form. In the context of the abstraction, the mouth doesn’t strike me as an element of artifice or superficially cosmetic, but the natural state of the world.  The painting lacks the solid physicality I have come to associate with acrylic paint.  This could be technique, or because the papery quality of the support further lends a feeling of impermanence or transcendence. But you seem to have two distinct ways of working in this portfolio. Death and Life is a curiously stylized and flat work, much more graphic in the figuration.  The pastel color and shapes have a faint Art Deco sensibility.  I find it interesting that these figures, representing opposite polarities, are only distinguished by their garments. This could be a graphic illustrative device serving as a purely decorative motif, or it could be suggesting something much finer between the world of the living and the dead.