Two Paintings by Summer
Sullivan
Private Collection
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Essentially the problem is, when you paint, things happen. "Picasso didn't know what blue was until he painted blue," says Godard. Apply black in large forms on a mauve ground, say, advancing from the lower left quadrant to nearly fill the painting, add a broken, buttery slash of ocher across the top of them, cutting a V of umbrageous red with a crimson vertex, so that black is on a field of red suspended over the backpainting, with a latitudinal spire of black emanating, and you have a start on Picasso by Van Velde, not so? |
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A later painting, and here things happen by a swatch of magenta cut across the bottom, over a modulated red trapezoid (deep to light-imbued, over vague greens, with an admirable smear of white and orange breaking over its irregular central edge). Behind this, a white-capped blue wave surmounting a shade of violet differentiated from the lighter violet background over, ultimately, blue; this violet background has, faintly discernible, a square of deeper color emerging from the mists over the blue wave. |
