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oil on canvas
36" x 42"
The artists Sigmar Polke and Roy Lichtenstein used Benday dots in their paintings as employed by printers (Lichtenstein modeled his work specifically after comics). I'm not so interested in the regularity of that method as I like the quirkiness of my hand as well as the option to change scale. The location of the dots is important to the space in the work. Think Cezanne, Giacometti, and Mondrian mapping space. Their playfulness as compared to a mechanized look make them more Polka than Benday and also differ from the seriousness of the aforementioned artists. I also do not want to limit myself to very saturated colors (spaced differently to appear like more of a range) as is often the case with the Benday dots, preferring to mix more, which works better with the larger dots. Mondrian, while not a dot painter, reduced his palette to the primaries. He found the problem of working with red, yellow, blue, as well as black and white very complex, changing the size and placement of rectangles and squares in order to create a vision resulting from this interplay.
In Spring #4 dots expand on a white ground, showing the bursting energy of the city and the green treetops of Central Park.
4 comments:
I love how the color scheme changes once you break out of the internal frame!
That's really impressive -- downright fizzy, actually! When I look at it, each of the three types of dots seem to be moving in a different directions to my eye: The side sections scroll up, the greenery burbles at the bottom, and the blue dots fly straight at me before disappearing over my head...
I was very interested in capturing the spatial experience of looking down at the treetops, ahead at the buildings in the distance (not very dot-ish), the sky/clouds overhead, as well as the buildings flanking the view of the park. The solidity of the buildings on the left and right compressed the space, and even though that compression is part of the New York City experience, it was too opposed to the mood of the city in spring and the open air. The result was the decision to leave most of the two rectangles white, have the dots be brick-like, and to have them move like an effervescent grid. I like your consise observation.
I love this one. The use of color and spatial relations is great.
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