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 Cassis, by Arthur Secunda

Personal Reflections, by Arthur Secunda

Cassis is a pochoir print done, as are all of my stencil prints, in the South of France, at a very old workshop near Avignon. Cassis is a reference to a small village between Marseilles and Saint-Tropez on the Mediterranean, not quite on the Riviera but on less-traveled Cote d'Or. I've spent many wonderful summers in Cassis. Its dramatic bauxite rocks jutting out of the water are iridescent and glow at night in a theater of vivid supernaturalism. The bauxite formations remind me of Les Baux, near Arles - another ancient town which glows in the dark and about which I have made a number of artworks as well. Cassis happens to be a climber's paradise. Many young men and women go bouldering there, coming from all parts of the world.

My interpretation of Cassis is quite a fantasy. Naturally, the rocks are not exactly this simplified. The village of Cassis lies around a bay from which extend small, peninsular, mountain outreaches into the sea in various coves at irregular distances. Each cove has a name and possesses certain character differences from each other. Some are nude beaches, some are fishermen's havens, some are boating harbors, and some are fancy beaches. I simplified my impressions to the utmost degree of my capability by depicting five jutting isthmuses in space with a claw-like attachment to the water - as if this giant hand or foot was imbedded into a hot, strange, tropical, exotic quagmire.

The geometric progression of chromatic colors which make up the subject of these land projections corresponds to the flat application of color central to the pochoir medium.

The plain yellow, ocher beigy sky as a backdrop to the hot mountain shapes (derived from torn-paper collage) represents a whole formal theme of mine. I have expressed similar images in a number of other graphics, including Costa Catalunya, for example, and in another aspect, even Big Black Sur in the merging of water and rock, solid and liquid, cool and hot, etc. Cassis, however, is one of the most reduced interpretations I've done. Only the essentials are presented. There's no real animation, except for the tension created in the lower left-hand region where the points of the mountains meet the points of the water in a kind of yin yang meshing, like a jigsaw puzzle. The color relationships of one mountain to another are such that the illusion of air is apparent, even palpable, between each plane of rock.

Even the cool colors are warm here, and so the mass is hot and projects a kind of afterglow much like embers do in a fireplace after the flame has gone out. It's the warmth of life - enhancing and lifegiving. The purpose of doing this in a landscape is to give nature humanness and body warmth, as if full of blood and breathing and organic energy. The aim of rendering forms, after all, is that they should not exist in a vacuum.

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