Sacagawea Art Gallery

I chose Lisa Englander’s watercolor from 1988 for my blog post.  I really like art, and have visited numerous museums over the years, and to be honest, this is not the type of art I usually enjoy.  I usually like art with softer colors, more blurred lines and more balanced.  Paul Cezanne’s landscapes (in particular, his forest scenes) have always been a favorite of mine. So, being drawn to this piece was unusual for me. 

I think what initially caught my eye with this is that it reminds me of the sheets of Origami paper I’ve used over the years.  I love Origami, and years ago, I helped a Japanese student with her English, and in return, she taught me Origami.  So, as I looked around the gallery, I thought, “Huh.  That looks like Origami paper!”  Therefore, throughout this post, I’m going to refer to these things as “sheets”!

The second fascinating aspect of this is that it’s a watercolor!  I’ve attempted watercolor, and I know JUST how tough it is to keep it from bleeding.  That could be my incredible lack of artistic talent, but it IS difficult.  There is very little bleeding in this piece.  It looks like acrylic or oil paint – except if you look closely, you can see some unevenness in color.  (Look at the lower left grey sheet.  You can see unevenness in the color in the lines.)  I thought that it was amazing that it was a watercolor!

Something that’s obvious about the piece is that it’s asymmetrical.  But not in a bad way.  It’s balanced with the bold and strong colors of the design and all the white negative space around it.  Personally, I think it’s appealing with all the sheets coming out of one corner.  If you look closely, you’ll also see that although the sheets look like they’re coming out of the lower right corner, the sides of that corner aren’t even.  The right side and bottom have gaps and aren’t aligned.  At first glance you think they are-but they’re not.  This is a great example of Principle 3: Balance in our text, WSINYE.  “Asymmetry, then, reveals two unequal sides if bisected.  Asymmetrical balance tends to be more visually exciting, or at least more visually interesting, than symmetrical balance.”  In my opinion, this asymmetry does make the piece more visually exciting and visually interesting!  The only thing that bothers me about it is that there is no border around the sheets; nothing “contains” them.  But that’s just a personal observation.

I also really liked the mix of patterns in the sheets. There are very geometric shapes in the majority of the sheets; checkerboard patterns, three dimensional and lines.  And then, in the center of the piece are sheets with, what looks like, flower patterns. The shape of these “sheets” don’t look square, either!  They almost look like fan shapes.  It looks like chaos within order.  And the crazy thing is that it works!  It seems balanced – and maybe it’s because it’s in the center of all the geometric designs.  In WSINYE, Element 3: Balance/Form talks about this. "In art lingo, we speak of two kinds of shapes-inorganic and organic.  Inorganic shapes and forms are precisely geometric, such as perfect circles, squares, rectangles, triangles, etc.  These don’t appear so much in nature so we say they’re inorganic.  Organic forms are more natural, as found in nature." Both organic and inorganic forms were used - and again, it works.

All in all, I really liked this piece.  The only problem I had with it was that I couldn’t figure out what it had to do with Sacagawea…