Blog II

The “Buddy” Exercise:

I found the work On the Edge of Night at the Kellogg Gallery to be appealing. This painting displays plant life, a lake, and a field with mountains behind it. The wolves in the scenery may be the subjects. What I find attractive about the work is the acute border between night and day. The border is so acute that it can almost be a thin line. At the bottom of the canvas, where the wolves are, it is night, so day is present on the rest of the canvas. Where it is night, the painting absolutely looks like night with the way the minimal light disperses and how every nocturnal thing is blue. Near the night are trees in darkness, but this darkness is not a result of the nighttime; it is attributed to shade from sunlight. Some light from the sun shines on some trees further from the night, so these trees have some parts with a morning glow. There is not much shade on the lake, and the sun shines intensely on the field and mountains. In addition, I noticed all of the wolves, except the one howling, looking at something off canvas.

I asked an employee at the gallery what he saw in the painting. He said that he didn’t see much, that it is what it is: wolves howling in the night. It is direct and it is well painted. It is not appealing to him because he prefers abstract art and the representational art he does prefer is of an alternate subject matter. He likes crude drawings and artworks displaying people in abnormal settings. His taste is oriented towards what he calls works with subjects out of context, where a subject is shown against an unusual background. An example he stated would be a photo of a nude girl in the middle of New York City. The nude girl is out of context because nude photos occur in private locations and the girl is in public, where she can be arrested for indecent exposure.