January 29, 2024 Issue

I love art description. There are two wonderful examples of it in this week’s issue – both by Jackson Arn. In his absorbing “Tone Control,” a review of an exhibition of works by the abstract painter Emily Mason, Arn writes,

I enjoy her paintings most when she makes an unlikely pair of colors scrape against each other and then smooths things over with a third. In “Greener Lean” (1978), the odd couple are a thick, too sugary green and a sickly yellow, and the deus ex machina is a drizzle of red in the lower right, which gives the yellow a little life and the green a little nuance. 

That “the deus ex machina is a drizzle of red” is excellent! Even better is Arn’s description of Mason’s “Like Some Old Fashioned Miracle” (1972-74):

Working your way from the left to the right side of the small, square “Like Some Old Fashioned Miracle” (1972-74), you first find bright yellow and blue cheek to cheek with hunter green, simple as two plus three equals five. In the center, everything goes wonky. The blue ripens, the shade of green switches from hunter to rusty penny, and the yellow disappears altogether, only to emerge on the other side bearing a little penny rust itself. 

Translating painting into words is itself an art - one that Arn seems quite adept at. 

Emily Mason, Like Some Old Fashioned Miracle (1972-74)