RapierFugue
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Tantriqu
Similarly, I didn't grok Seurat until I got up close in Paris and actually saw how, like photography, the dots of red, green and purple pointillism melt and resolve into a brown figure as you walk up and back away. Nifty!
When he found out I was going to DC for a holiday a few years ago, my mate (the art chappy) said "whatever you do, go see the Pollock No 1 at the National, and when you've looked at it, do this ..." and described the following:
“The picture is a huge (8' 10" x 17' 5 5/8", according to google) canvas, but they house it in quite a large room, and unlike most of their other pieces there’s very little near it. Go to the opposite corner of the room, furthest from it (which is quite a way away, maybe 20 yards or so) and fix on a point at its centre.
Then walk slowly towards it, keeping your gaze fixed on that central point, and see what you can see.”
So of course I did; the results were incredible; as you walk towards it, you obviously start by perceiving the largest layers & splashes of paint. They are almost perfectly in compositional proportion. That’s tricky enough to do when you're working on such a large canvas by splashing paint on it in what appears to be a random fashion, but wait ...
... as you get closer, your brain starts to pick up smaller and smaller splashes and layers, and the bigger ones sort of “fade out” because they’re no longer the most “interesting” (to your brain) layers, but (and this is the really weird thing) the painting and its layers are still compositionally correct (!) – in other words, there isn't a point where there's too much paint there, or too little there, it’s all still perfect.
So you keep walking up to it, slowly, and keep your gaze fixed in the centre, and it reveals layer upon layer, smaller and smaller, until you're as close to it as you can get (about a yard and a half with the ropes) and the centre section of it, with its very small layers, is still in near perfect proportion.
How on earth someone can imagine all that when they're working on a huge canvas, from the “wrong” angles (it was on the floor, and he couldn't get further than a few yards from it) is absolutely beyond me. Pollock once said, when asked if it was "random": "I can control the flow of the paint. There is no accident."
I did it again, then again. Absolutely gobsmacking, and you can’t see that from a simple photo of it*.
I noticed the huge security guard (a black guy who looked big enough to have played linebacker for the Redskins) looking at me and smiling, so I went over. He said “who told you to look at it like that?” and I told him, and he said “yeah, some folks like it, and some don't, but you gotta say it’s a hell of a piece”. I asked what he thought of it and he said, with genuine emotion and a huge smile “I love it. Makes me proud to be an American”, and I could understand that :)
* http://www.nga.gov/feature/pollock/lm1024.jpg
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