Icy!
New work - Untitled oil/board 36" by 48" (c) 2004 Jamie Bollenbach
The larger of these two paintings is more elaborate and resolved; I had trouble with an inadequate scanner and all the color detail in the water is lost - but the sense of ice bound light is there. The contrast here is not exagerated. The range of color is much greater in person.
Again, the idea of the imagined arctic drives this piece. My plan to work in the Far North just got a boost with a friend at the Alaska Native Arts Foundation, and a proposal we're thinking on for a circumpolar exhibit on climate and cultural change in the idea of the arctic.
A quick discussion on the relationship between abstraction and realism here. This is very old school modernism in it's approach- these have no observed source and are resolved from large swaths of pure color, refined down bit by bit, using the imaginary seascape that results as a place for my figurative marks to inhabit, like a DeKooning line cavorting around a Turner. In painting, I'm uninterested in ironic positioning; in all truth this is a little closer to imagining ice fairies, except for the process, which is all abstract expressionism.
posted by JAB at 4:08 PM
2 Comments:
Hey, I really like these. It looks like I am looking out of the hood of a tunnel-like parka onto the ice. The blue denotes, glacial ice does it not?
Glad you like it, and yes, in terms of color, that's what I was thinking of. But I'm not being specific about this as a place, or a particular kind of ice, or even ice, in a way. It did come to appear as sea ice, made of glacial ice, which of course isn't really right - the ice here has a flat surface.
But that unreality actually is important- the sense of chill and the distance and the deep is what matters to the painting, and then only as a stage for the figurative elements, which are the real subject.
How it got there is a matter of refined accident and rerefined process, which is why it's not an illustration; with an illustration you know exactly where you're going when you start.
This is a major conceit of painting begining about 1945 with much earlier roots; there is a perfect analogy to improvisation in jazz, where the formal understanding and the intuition are united and progressive: theme and variations.
To take a bagpiping analogy....
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