Skip to main content

A Painting by Ravenna Taylor

Decay of Sound, 2013, 22 x 24 inches, Oil, Canvas, Wood
This painting by artist Ravenna Taylor is currently part of an online exhibition of her work, which you can see here. In an exchange of comments via Facebook, Ravenna mentioned that a lot of people liked her older work better, so I decided to do an experiment: I went to the online gallery, looked through the images on show without looking at any dates or titles, and chose the first few that caught me eye. It turned out that in each case, I was drawn to the new work.

There are many things I like about this painting. I like the way it plays with geometric abstraction, but loosely -- nothing is drawn with a ruler, nothing is rigid or too straight, all is marked out by the patient movement of a hand and a brush, putting down mark after mark. It's possible that the idea or the selection of shapes starts out planned, but it doesn't look that way in the execution. It all looks like the artist was alive to how putting one shape against another shape might change the balance of the composition, so that one or two shapes found their way onto the surface unannounced, like last-minute guests at the party who arrive with just the right bottle of wine in their hands. It's a contemplative painting: the squiggly shapes on the left (which might be derived from sound waves, maybe not) move the eye quicker over the picture plane than the squares and segments on the right, but on the whole it's a slow picture. A picture that takes its time. I like the colour selection, too, with the muted, bleached out tones inviting sensations of rest, and just a couple of lines of dark red to provide a hint of warmth.

Matthew Collings said something recently about how abstract painting often depends on context for its effect and its meanings. So that patterns and forms that are unbounded by the edges of a picture do indeed look like they might come from a pattern-catalogue, but once they are surrounded by some white space, the eye reads them differently, and looks for values in them other than the pleasure of pure repetition.This painting does that for me: enough balance to satisfy the human need for proportion, and enough space in it to invite that urge to return to the site of something inexplicable.

Popular posts from this blog

Restoring my Printing Press

I've just finished restoring and assembling my large etching press -- a six week process involving lots of rust removal, scrubbing with steel wool, and repainting. Here is a photo of the same kind of press from the Chicago Printmakers Collaborative: And here is a short YouTube video of me testing the press, making sure the motor still works after nearly seven years of lying in storage:

Brancusi in Plastic

Artist Mary Ellen Croteau is showing these columns made from recycled plastic cartons and lids in the window of the Columbia College bookstore on Michigan Avenue. They are a playful homage to Brancusi's "Endless Columns", with a serious environmental message for our times: Image copyright Inhabitat.com and Mary Ellen Croteau Mary Ellen also runs a wonderful experimental art gallery in a window space in west Chicago, called Art on Armitage . I will be exhibiting a mixed media piece there during August 2012.

How to etch a linoleum block

Linoleum as a material for printmaking has been used for nearly a hundred years now. Normally, you cut an image out using special gouges similar to woodcut tools, cutting away the lino around the image you want to print. This is called relief printmaking, because if you look at the block from the side, the material that remains stands up in relief from the backing material. You then roll ink with a brayer over the surface of the block, place paper over it, and either print by hand or run it through a press. You can do complex things this way (for example, reduction linocuts), but the beauty of the process is that it is quick, simple, and direct. Incised lino block, from me.redith.com Etched lino block, from Steve Edwards A few years ago, I saw some prints that were classified as coming from etched linoleum blocks, and I loved the textures I saw in them. In the last few months, I've been trying to use this technique in my own studio, learning about it as one does these d