Woman No. 3

Comment

Comment by Resident Curator on June 25, 2012 at 8:19pm

Curator’s Comment:

 

There’s a real freshness to these figure studies, combined with stoic classicism.  They appear to be conte washes in the Cubist tradition of fractured planes and edges of space, ultimately forming a figure in the round.   I especially like the second image (Woman No.3) because her backward glancing head is rendered in a sensitive fashion; her heavy lidded eye and full facial features form a delicate mask, but then her torso dissolves into abstraction as I work my way down the picture plane.  The squared off format of these works is curious- I wonder if they’re cropped details of a larger whole? I sense gestural movement that seems to travel beyond the confines of the cropped frame. The small inclusion of blue lines and orange background also animates the space, and adds a bright, decisive energy. I believe Woman 1 and 2 are also elegant in their abstraction.  But the distortion by economy of their faces moves them further away from human expression, and into a total embrace of formal design.