Multnomah Falls

Comment

Comment by Resident Curator on June 29, 2017 at 10:44am

Thanks for responding- it's a wonderful piece.

Comment by Nikki Coulombe on June 28, 2017 at 8:12pm

Your critiques are always appreciated, thoughtful, and revelatory. It is almost always too tempting to resolve riddles and tidy up, but chaos has a place, and certainly in a waterfall. Abandoning thinking and simply responding to a subject can produce most interesting results. Learning and un-learning never ends - love it. 

Comment by Resident Curator on June 28, 2017 at 7:04pm

Curator’s Comments:

 

Moltnomah Falls cascades with a beautiful rush of soft color and light.  The opacity of the (resisted white paper?) cuts through the murkier light values on either side.  I’m enamored with the layered areas of semi-transparent brown and blue-green dappled hues.  Rather than cancel each other out with warm versus cool tones, the temperature shifts add complexity and depth to the fall palette.   I’m not certain about the origin of the interior spindled shape; it resembles a thin evergreen tree with dark green branches or limbs, but it visually dissolves into the liquid color surrounding it.  As a visual break it offers compositional organization and a hint at bilateral symmetry in nature, without injecting a specifically illustrative element to the abstraction. This piece nicely reveals your dexterity cutting across different stylistic approaches to landscape, and merges them in an unexpected way.