Addiction

Comment

Comment by Resident Curator on May 3, 2016 at 6:53pm

Curator’s Comments:

 

I agree with Bob’s comment, recognizing it was made several years back.  Addiction came up in a random image search for me today, and I still find it to be an amazing piece.  The human hand and dimensional sphere anchor the loose abstraction and swirling activity around these figurative elements. The pink fleshy color patches repeated against the blue-green ground create visual tension through their unexpected figure-ground relationship.  While the colors dramatically shift between warm and cool palettes, they create a pleasing pattern that lures the viewer into the space.  On longer viewing I do see marks of agitation and opposition that fit the title of the work, as the long vertical black marks suggest heartbeat or human rhythm.   I believe when I first came across your paintings on the site I was struck by your intense realism alongside more expressionistic works.  Both aesthetic approaches appear to inhabit this painting, in an interesting clash of styles that become unified by the design of their divergence.

Comment by Bob Batchelor on June 5, 2009 at 6:27pm

Paula, this is astonishingly good, love the hand especially.