White Painting by Jane Fine

http://janefine.net/a/painting

Jane Fine, white painting

A white painting by Jane Fine as seen in an informal and private viewing at Pierogi. This is from her recent show (Formulas for Now, spring 2012), where it functioned as a culmination point for richer, darker works exhibited with it. The painting stays with me for the optical effects of white veils over light, buoyant color.

Look at these beauties--Poussin's battle scenes duke it out with Philip Guston and Robert Colescott

Overexposed iPhone image of harbor and flags: look at how color originates in orange notes that burst into flame and are then cooled by the incursion of earth, or flesh and water opposites

.

Another painting: ultramarine blue extends optical intensity, slowed by earth mixtures

A closer view of the battle scene (reminds me of Guston's hairy hands holding trash-can-lid shields in the Met)

Guston, Street, 1977, 69 x 110 (approx.), Metropolitan Museum of Art

And it all comes tumbling down...look at the color: such muted primaries, variations!

A detail of Fine's drawing: marking systems at play

Fine spent a year working on drawings only and it shows in this Breughel-like mountain formation.

Detail upper right

Another drawing, created on dark paper as many of her drawings are.

Recently I've been hankering for constructed compositions, to look at as well as to make. Fine's work is so rewarding for this as well as for chroma and mark. There is nothing more fulfilling than witnessing a body of work grow over time and get better and better. It's what artists live to see as well as to do.