high desert song, i
high desert song, i
by dawn chandler
Maybe it's a desire for order, to tame what's wild or chaotic. That's one theory behind my compulsion to divide my abstract landscapes into rectangles; to score them with horizontal and especially vertical lines. I don't know where that impulse comes from, but to me — and I've written about this before quite a bit — those lines serve to designate time or space; to describe windows or portals into the landscape. Perhaps into memory.
When I was working on this painting though — back when I was still on social media — I shared it as a "work in progress" on FaceBook. At that time it had two clear and distinct tall rectangles of identical dimension and proportion. It blew my mind that, despite the clear landscape colors of the painting, a few people saw sky scrapers. In fact, several asked if the painting was about the Twin Towers. What? I was shocked. Sky scrapers and the WTC were the furthest things from my mind!
And yet.... I realized that for a whole lot of people, a tall rectangle against a sky represents a sky scraper. [Which makes me wonder: had the rectangles had domed tops, would they think grain elevators instead?]
I went back into the painting and diminished the alarming "WTC effect;" the painting was transformed. But to this day I keep the WTC effect in mind when I'm scribing and painting my rectangles to make sure skyscrapers don't appear!