Acrylic paint on 185gsm Arches watercolour paper. 29.7cm x 42cm.
The painting above is Dog Town (1931) by Marsden Hartley. I’ve been staring at it for days. Something about it pulls me in…and pushes me back. Come closer……. No, go back. Maybe its the hot and cold colours; the heavily outlined rocks set against the expressionism of the grass and bushes. I wouldn’t presume to know what the artist was thinking……to me, it looks like the landscape is in turmoil… and there are these solid, weighty things pinning it down….preventing everything from flying off into the air.
This got me thinking about our inner landscapes; the unconscious. Feelings move and change shape like breeze through grass. Certainties are as real as stone. The heart and mind…each with its own nature.
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Oh dear…..I don’t think Mr Hartley would’ve thought much of my interpretation at all. I just went off to google and found this page: Marsden Hartley, Art and the Personal Life, 1928
“I have come to the conclusion that it is better to have two colors in right relation to each other than to have a vast confusion of emotional exuberance in the guise of ecstatic fullness or poetical revelation both of which qualities have, generally speaking, long since become second rate experience. I had rather be intellectually right than emotionally exuberant, and I could say this of any other aspect of my personal experience.”
Eeeeesh…..I am the polar opposite of all that. Good Lord :-/
