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Old Mister Crow
Join Date: May-2002
Location: Seattle, WA.
Country: USA
Posts: 3,197
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The piece by Banting and Kolar (pictured below) was actually among my least favorite of those displayed. I thought it was compositionally dead in the water, no pun intended.
On the horizontal, the center of the visual mass of the tree is right dead center of the background. WHY?
On the vertical, the tops of the incut segments reach exactly the vertical center of the background.
The copper backdrop obscures the pot.
The movement of the tree (blue arrows) is stopped dead by the implied upward movement (if there's any movement at all; these are more like bars to cage than dynamic objects) of the background (yellow arrows)
The slate base is at once insipid and out of place in the implied bayou.
The square corners of the background antagonize the forms within.
And who the hell would display a swamp cypress without a huge buttress and sick taper?
(Of course I'm just kidding on this last point - actually this tree is one of my favorites in all of the Pacific Rim collection, precisely because it doesn't fall prey to that fad and instead follows its own graceful form to the sky.)
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As you can probably tell, I'm brand new to this sort of thinking. But here's my effort at a critique of this piece, and my effort to explain why found it among the worst of the exhibit.
Since I don't really know what I'm doing, I'd really love to hear comments on where I went right or wrong in my analysis.
Best regards,
Old Mister (aka Carl, since we seem to be using names here today...)
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In love with trees
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