[Today’s featured artwork for Day 78 of the 365 Days Project is by Judith Kramer.]
Artists just love to mess with your head.
#78 – The Logical Mind and the Artist Mind are always in a dance and Artists will play with that balance to provoke alternate perspectives.
What would happen if you removed all the emotion, vivid color, stories, people, nature and social criticism from the creative arts? Could you create an art form that incorporated geometry, powerful hard-edged lines, linear themes, controlled precision, and a calm sense of detachment? This is what a group of American artists were exploring in the early 1920′s, forming a movement called Precisionism that became the precursor to abstraction.
Judith Kramer takes these Precisionist concepts and artfully tweaks the perspective, creating paintings that are clear, precise, dynamic and bold. Emotions are not called upon to dance with the work, but the mind is fully engaged as the viewer’s eye endlessly wanders about the painting, shifting the brain from left to right and back again. Some of the work is almost hypnotic but all of the paintings masterfully invoke an elegant balance.
“My passion for the drama and precision of simple linear forms, combined with the interaction of color, identifies my work,” said Kramer. “Drawing the shapes is an engineering/drafting process. Brushing on flat, broad areas of color, paint application is strongly controlled so that brush strokes are rarely noticeable. The edges of forms are razor sharp. People and nature are absent from my paintings. Volumes are reduced to colored planes. Canvases combine effects of flatness with those of depth and perspective.”
“Although the rigors of geometrics are evident in all of my paintings,” the artist explained, “the way I play with and change perspective can be unsettling, but creates a new dynamic of spatial movement. My paintings are uncomplicated, and appeal to anyone’s love of color and pattern…”
It’s almost a contradiction to use left-brain concepts in a right-brained endeavor, but that’s precisely what Artists love to do – work with the contradictions of life. It’s that exploration that offers the world perspectives we would otherwise never have imagined.
Judith Kramer’s artwork can be viewed at: Judith Kramer
Description of the images included in this post:
Shining Through a Closer View
Judith Kramer, Arizona
Acrylic on canvas
Welcome to the Neighborhood
Judith Kramer, Arizona
Acrylic on canvas
The 365 Days Project
In 2012, Serena Kovalosky committed to writing an article a day for 365 days as an exploration into the lives of artists and the value of creative thinking in our society.
Experience the full evolution of the project! Click below to read the entire collection of articles.
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