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.
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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.
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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).
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These winter landscapes, similarly to the river paintings, are marked with calm that seems to emanate from inner, deeper resources. If the latter encouraged to envision underwater currents, the former appear to conceal sources of quiet energy under the ground — or under the snow, as if in hibernation. I think that this impalpable illusion is the result of the effortless transformation of color harmony into clear, breathing atmosphere. There are few colors here: white, pale brown, pale blue and some shades of black; the general low to neutral temperature of the palette correlates with the season the colors depict. The white snow binds the blues and the browns as an intermediary that simultaneously plays the part of the dominant color. The overall harmony and economy create that special mood of stillness, which lies in wait for the viewers, to pass on some of that hidden energy.
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The decorative association in these bright, warm paintings is so strong that I think about white dresses bedecked with orange spots (or flowers). Incidentally, these series depict autumn, when nature changes attires — to something more austere — and the artist captures the lyricism of this languorous process. The contrast of the white and the orange is so striking as to almost scream from the canvas; it doesn’t, however — it sings instead. To ensure consonance, the artist provides space for additional colors, such as the green of the leaves and grass, the blue of the river and the brown of the mountains. The latter two produce a background harmony that supports the melody at the front.
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