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Okay. Well, let’s take a look.
It’s lovely.
It’s hard to resolve it.
I find myself bouncing between levels as I look at it, because at one level it's a pattern of colors and a rhythm
and I like the colors in the rhythm.
And at the same time it seems to have elements of a picture, of a representative picture of something.
There’s something that looks like a ground and something that looks like it’s more or less free-made,
coming over the sides and it looks like there’s a center where my eye is drawn
or maybe my brain is drawn as I try to get the center to be a picture of something.
And I’ve no idea if that’s appropriate
or whether it’s just a brain trick that the upper right looks a little bit like there is a face there and a body on the right,
another body on the left and one’s standing and one’s horizontal or falling and that there is … looks like there is motion in the middle,
but again I can’t tell if that’s a brain trick or something intentional on the part of the artist, or both.
It looks like it’s composed out of repeated pieces, whether that’s a field of organic matter or, you know, flowers or something
or whether it’s a set of people.
And it’s hard to resolve that as a representational picture and so I bounce back to it as a rhythm of colors and design.
At this point, if this were hanging in a gallery, I would have checked the artist’s title for it,
which I often have mixed feelings about doing as I do now.
’Cause on the one hand, I assume that the artist wants the picture to … the painting to speak for itself,
on the other hand, things don’t really speak for themselves
and if the artist wants to give me as a viewer some guidance that will resolve the picture in a particular way,
I’m happy to get that.
So, so, what is the title of this?
The title is “Titanic”.
So, now the next layer, next level of the brain trick continues, where my brain says:
Ah, okay. "Titanic" – I know a little bit about this myth, it's … I don’t know enough to be able to identify the figures.
But now I’m pretty sure that I'm supposed to be looking for ... have my brain resolve this as figures,
the titanic struggle with the small folks which are us at the bottom and the great titans battling for supremacy.
And so it had seemed before hearing the title to be … the horizontal didn’t seem to be somebody in repose,
it did seem to be somebody who perhaps was knocked down, being killed, you know, struck,
and the central swirl of what looks like action now resolves itself as a blow.
And so the bottom, which had seemed organic,
one way or another, now resolves very much as people in turmoil and people watching and possibly being crushed.
I find myself moved by art where the artist has managed through the use of mere paint and little motions of her or his hand
to create something that is so overwhelming visually that you can’t imagine that this is made out of mere oil and bristle
and I find that really emotional.
And I really like this painting that way.
I do like the way in which the colors reflect or cause or modify, I’m not sure what the word is,
but, you know, the integration of … the way in which the picture moves your eye around,
from the bottom to the right and then up and in sort of a spiral towards the center which is supposed to be the …
because it's the center, it is supposed to be the center of the action,
it's sort of the last that you get to, ’cause the rhythm of that moves you around,
and the rhythm seems to be either accomplished by or magnified by the use of the blue and the yellow colors,
and I like that a lot.
Well, it looks very much at home in our living room.
I’m going to be sorry to see it go but …