- titled: titled lower left in margin, in pencil
- signed: lower right in margin, in pencil; numbered lower
left in margin, in pencil; printer's chop lower right corner;
artist's copyright lower right corner
- medium: serigraph with 4 colors and 1 blend; printed by
Robert Dressen, Jeff Wasserman and Kevin Griffen at Wasserman
Silkscreen, Santa Monica, California
- dimensions: image size: 15 x 42" (38.1 x 106.7 cm);
sheet size: 19 x 46" (48.3 x 116.8 cm)
- edition: 150 prints, 5 archive proofs, 18 artist's
proofs, 15 hors de commerce, 4 printer's proofs; all on Stonehenge
paper
- date published: 1981
Personal Reflections, by Arthur Secunda
Red Sky, Black Mountain is a long, narrow, horizontal
silkscreen composed of land masses, shrouded in hidden fragments
that resemble half-filled burlap sacks. These three mountaintops
harken back to Goya figures shrouded with capes, hiding their
faces, and hidden from the viewer's frontal presence. They are
therefore hidden from the viewer's perception as total entities.
These three mountain shapes - black, green, pinky-rose forms - are
comparable to tips of icebergs in the sense that what is seen is
only an abstract hint of what may be hidden.
The mountain shapes against a brilliant cadmium red sky only
begin to tell the story. The sun image is a floating cloud. It has
the shape of a sun but the sonority of a cloud. The red sky defies
reality. It reminds me of the sky in Arles, which is also red. Red
and black have a special symbolic vibration, not at all optical,
but sonorous and rhythmic. Red and black - the blood, the night;
the fire, the mystery; the solid, the void; the human, the eternal;
red and black become intense neighbors.
Using five basic forms, this landscape has been transposed into
more than the landscape. Its matter is outer spatial, surreal,
unpopulated - an other-worldly coming together of forms which
depend upon one another, as they huddle toward each other and seek
companionship. The negative shape of the black mountain points
toward the middle, while the negative shape of the rose-colored
mountain (hovering behind the green) cowers in an implicit needing
of closeness. There is a slowness in their existence and a
weightiness of movement. The floating cloud (or sun) gazes
benignly, the only moving entity in the scene.
There is a rich serenity of tactile, nuanced forms in this
picture, which lock together in a very essential way, so that the
totality speaks in one voice about secretness, mystery, intensity,
and internally dependent forms. The colors and the timelessness of
the subject/content here perhaps refer to an eternal transcendence,
or at least to a complex spectrum of feelings, which is playful as
well as spiritual.
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