Otto Rogers - Pink Sky
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That was a very interesting period. I was still very much influenced by the horizon line at that time, but that phase of my work, the horizon line kept moving in the canvas. Pink Sky is five by five feet and some of those...the horizon line was right at the bottom. This particular one, the horizon line is, I think, an inch and a half or so…it follows the bottom of the picture and almost gets mixed in with the frame. Some of those paintings from the same time, the horizon line was at the top and it kept shifting. It kind of was like philosophic too, because when you look at the horizon line and you wonder what your life is going to be like after a certain amount of time, the horizon line is like that. Because you move always towards the horizon line, but when you get there, the horizon line moves further. And so I was having a lot of fun playing with where the horizon line was. And eventually I got bored with that and I flipped the painting vertically. So that the horizon line became vertical. The Mendel Gallery has somewhere…they are five by six foot paintings and they are divided in half with a line right down the middle, and if you flip them they look like the older landscape with the horizon line. But they look better as paintings with the horizon line vertical, so they became more abstract. And also the other thing about Pink Sky was that for a while I used a lot of dots - points in space. And points in space are amazing because if they are large and rough like a thick texture and they are closer to you and then there are smaller ones, your eye tend to…your mind tends to read those as being further away so you expand the space. I was expanding the space by the placement of the dots and the measurement of distance between one dot and another. And the relationship of the dots to the edge of the canvas, the four sides, was very important because you are always working inside a rectangle which is a kind of a cube space. So you are working with a flat surface, but you are also working with infinity. And so the dots and the Pink Sky was also sprayed. I used a spray gun, and I was spraying over thick paint, and so that really emphasized the surface of the painting. But then the dots were talking about the distance so you had this diversity of engagement with the surface of the painting and with the imaginary infinity of space.

Duration: 3:07 min
Size: 12894kb

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