Emotions: A place to immerse
Lynne Drexler's use of bright colours with small, repetitive colour blocks makes a huge bang, a kind of pictorial resonance: a resonance built around a symbol. One painting is the resonance of another, and in the same way, within a painting, it is the resonance of one colour block with another, the resonance of countless blocks of emotions. They answer to each other.
Rosson Crow uses brushstrokes that seem out of control to interpret and understand architectural historical themes and spaces, with visually striking scenes of chaos and bright, bloody colours. She is fascinated by the complex relationship between modern-day America and mythology. The large canvas becomes a backdrop, a stage for the drama of desire, a spectacle of space in overabundance, the madness of excess, and the indulgence of violence, power, and ignorance. The viewer can go in and experience, and in a way become, a character in the work.
“Rosson Crow.” HUMANITY Magazine, September 26, 2017. https://mag.citizensofhumanity.com/blog/2015/12/17/rosson-crow/.
Mark Rothko
Rothko's large-scale paintings use big chunks of colour to create a transcendent immediacy that overwhelms the sensual, intent on expressing strong emotions such as sadness, anxiety, ecstasy, and fear. Beyond the colour, what is also crucial is the relationship between the painting and the space, between the painter and the viewer. Rothko's paintings should be mounted in the simplest way in order to remove any obstruction. In this way, it can feel that Rothko's brushwork and colour are 'breathed' onto the surface of the canvas, becoming a 'dynamic organism'.
Zainab Saleh
Saleh's paintings have a fairytale-like elegance. Nature's flora and light limbs are recurrent elements in her paintings. The fluid lines and gauzy brushstrokes create a hazy, Zen-like melancholy. It is like listening to a softly and slowly poem.
This pencil sketch was created when Yayoi Kusama was 10 years old. The brushstrokes create a grid of touch from edge to edge, followed by a web of dots. In this process, ''self-obscuration'' and the self are not articulated, but rather an atmosphere of 'shelter' is created by varying the size and sparseness. She says that this is a portrait of her mother, who treated her with violence and thus caused her incurable trauma for the rest of her life.
Untitled, 1939
Ruprecht Von Kaufmann
Von Kaufmann's paintings are poetic and mysterious in their stories and emotional transmission. I love the cool, soft blue and purple shadows in his paintings, making me feel like one of these daydreamers. His backgrounds are simplified and left in the finished paintings with some underlying drawing touches. In this way, he feels more 'to the point' and 'impactful'. He has consciously avoided ‘portraits’ and blurred the identity of the characters so that the audiences can easily subsume themselves into the story of the paintings.
Ruprecht von Kaufmann, Der letzte Akt, 2019. Oil on linoleum on wood – 153 x 184 cm.
