Color Pattern Grid

When it comes to critiquing art I have a habit of making quick first judgments, labeling pieces as either good or bad simply based on aesthetics. This does sometimes change based on background information given about the idea of the art or the artists' vision, but this is hardly ever provided along with individual pieces in galleries and aside from artists and works of art that I am obsessed with I hardly ever do any additional research. Although I was split almost half and half on the pieces in the show, loving half and disliking half, I loved the show as a whole. In terms of meeting the requirements of the title Color Pattern Grid, the show covered a diverse range of every type of art that kept me circling the gallery several times seeing something new each rotation, which is a lot to say for someone like me who loses interest extremely easily. At first sight the pieces that caught my eye followed the same guidelines that I always seem to set. I am attracted to Ð''organic' art, primitive, unfinished, and fresh works, and Picasso. So of course my first and still number one of the show was Picasso's Portrait of Dora Maar. Picasso has always and probably will always be my god, my favorite painting being his Girl Before a Mirror. I have always been attracted to his cubist half face/half profile portraits and the way that every painting of his seems to have been done with no unnecessary stoke. His art gives me the feeling that he knows how the painting should be, there is no second guessing or doubt and therefore no second layer of paint covering something that doesn't look right underneath it. I tend to paint balanced pieces that show things as they should look, so I think what attracts me most to his work is the exact opposite of this, for example the dark shape of hair on the far left and the three pronged, blue nose. Other pieces that caught my eye on the first rotation around the gallery were Richard Diebenkorn's Untitled number 7, Chuck Close's Self Portrait and the two photographs of water. Diebenkorn and Close' works have always interested me. The Self Portrait mostly because of the shapes, contrast, and idea he used to make such an original product from the over done idea of a self portrait. Usually anything done on a grid, because it is so precise and rigid, turns me off, but the rounded, organic feel of the squares and the shapes that form his features, although they still feel crisp or clean to me, have a more nature feel as opposed to a machine made work. Jungjin Lee and Hiroshi Sugimotos' black and white photographs were also among my favorite of the show. I again have always been partial to works based on water, but I think I would have been attracted to these regardless based on the compositions.

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