The bright flowers in the foreground create a powerful framing effect. It may seem as though these garlands hang from a window frame and all that is missing is someone’s hand stretching out and pushing them aside to clear the view. This is another exotic motif, this time of a Japanese origin: if you examine these prints by Hiroshige Utagawa or Utamaro Kitagawa , you will notice strings of written text — Japanese hieroglyphs — adorning the prints’ sides. The hieroglyphs are often colored red, just like the color of the flowers on the sides of Dawn Lundquist’s waterfall paintings. This is a clever quote and an impressive trick that raises the value of the artwork by a link to another aesthetic heritage.
Read the rest of this entry »
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Exuberant colors again convey the exotic, tropical climate of Hawaii. In a way the roosters are not dissimilar to the flowers. Both display expressed decorative elements; the petals’ shape resembles the combs’ and the tails’. But there is a fundamental difference between the two: the flowers are passive and languorous whereas the roosters look aggressive and lively. If color movement in the floral pieces was more or less limited to a steady, constant and vibrant shimmer, here the painterly effect assumes the explosive power of a sudden attack — a real one, as far as some of the cocky subjects are willing to demonstrate.
Read the rest of this entry »
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Dawn Lundquist is an American artist painting Hawaiian seascapes, various flora and other, less conventional themes. She publishes her work on her website, Lundquiststudios, which offers for sale original pieces as well as prints and Giclees. Read more about Dawn Lundquist on her about page. In today’s review I would like to discuss the artist’s florals.
Arguably the most dominant stylistic feature in these paintings is the dense, overflowing use of color. It appears to trickle down from the petals and paint the air; the flowers seem to be sweating hue, so thick and generous are the patches of deep blue, red, white and orange. Usually only two or three main colors constitute the entire palette; they interchange and create intense compositions (usually relying on radial symmetry).
Read the rest of this entry »
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
