Standing before it, the eye first meets a field of red that seems to have set rather than been painted. Then the surface opens. Fine cracks run through the glaze like frost on a window, and through them the earlier painting shows in fragments: a line of blue, a glint of gold and silver along a seam, a block of violet holding its edge under the veil. The structure is still there, but it is no longer presented. It has to be found.
Frosted Red SELF holds an Abstraction Quotient of 5. Nothing in it can be named. Its distance from Circuit Board of SELF is not measured in subject, since neither has one, but in access. The earlier painting showed its circuit openly; this one lets you see it only through breaks the painting made in itself, and that moves a strictly geometric work to another level of abstraction.
The decisive event was not planned. A Liquin glaze sealed the painting, tape and patience could not reopen it, and a varnish spray on one corner did, cracking the red until the whole surface frosted overnight. It is a third life of one canvas that the painter did not so much make as allow, and it argues better than any statement could that a surface can carry its own history forward, visible only where it has broken.
Longing
looking through sealed cracked frosted remembered
STANDING THERE
I lean in without meaning to. The red holds me at the surface, and then a crack opens and my eyes go looking through it for the blue.
WHAT LINGERS
The blue at the edge of a crack, and the thin glint of gold along a seam: small, and impossible to stop looking for once you have seen it.
WHO IT FINDS
This finds the part of me that is still there under everything I have become, showing through only where the surface has given way.
Where it lives
- LIGHT
- Raking or angled light. The frost is a surface event: a light from the side picks out every crack and lets the blue, gold and silver underneath catch, while flat light from the front reads the painting as a single red. Warm light deepens the red; neutral light keeps the violet honest.
- MINIMUM CEILING
- 9 ft
- MINIMUM WALL
- 8 ft
- DAYLIGHT
- Keep it out of direct sun. The crackle is the painting, and strong daylight flattens it to a plain red field; a north wall or indirect light lets the frost read.