Virtual Backgrounds

Back in April we reimagined digital images in the archived collection as video call backgrounds that fit standard conferencing platforms. The images are inserted in the generic interiors and are stretched beyond the size of the original dimensions of the work. The virtual backgrounds become potential backdrops for users to demonstrate their knowledge of the collection or mask their domestic spaces.

The Spirit in the Mass in Dorothy Mead’s Paintings

by Alice Mcleod-Bishop

Dorothy Mead (1928-1975) joined the Borough Group in 1946 as an original member of the group which was dedicated to portraying David Bomberg’s (1890-1957) Modernist teaching methods and his philosophy known as the Spirit in the Mass, until the group’s dissolution in 1951. The notion of Spirit in the Mass was primarily about the connection between art and wider life, where he aimed to capture someone as they are in the world rather than as a subject. He understood the ‘self’ as a conditional relationship in consideration of its surroundings, taking into account the artist’s perception of the subject, as well as the phenomenology (the experience of experiencing something) of the subject – to capture what it is like for the sitter, landscape, cityscape etc., to be and exist as itself rather than solely the artist’s depiction of what it might look like at face-value. The idea of mass specifically relates to the synthesis of thought and feeling: the artist must assume ignorance about the subject whilst not being ignorant, and show the world as we see it, as uncertainty. Bomberg believed that modernist drawing is seen “as a deliberate distortion of optical truth”[i], and thus one must be classically trained if aiming to distort; yet if the artist is concerned with how things ‘feel’, then what they draw will naturally be a subjective and therefore distorted view of reality. 

This is what drove Bomberg to teach his anti-establishment methods, which in turn meant he was met with distaste and disapproval from the contemporary art community and was not recognised as a legitimate teacher. His views were widely misunderstood due to the lack of clarity surrounding his ideas and the somewhat confusing way in which they are worded in the Bomberg Papers. Contemporary critics and teachers failed to ascertain what Bomberg’s philosophy entailed, and to this day his teachings are confused by many[ii]. It is highly difficult to truly grasp exactly what Bomberg aimed to portray in his classes and what is the Spirit in the Mass; it seems that only those who were his students managed to understand Bomberg’s revolutionary methods and accurately capture what Bomberg perceived to be the Spirit in the Mass. 

One of these students was Dorothy Mead, who was especially dedicated to Bomberg’s methods and was forced to leave the Slade art school because of her allegiance to the British Modernist artist. Bomberg’s influence on Mead is evident in her paintings, particularly her depictions of bodies, figures and landscapes: stylistically, Mead’s work is reminiscent of Bomberg’s post-war paintings, using thick expressive brush strokes and dark colours to portray a sense of the subject and its essence, an idea that was integral to Bomberg’s philosophy. It is difficult to delineate precisely how far Mead was able to capture the Spirit of her subjects, since we cannot know in detail her relationship with what and who she painted, nor how far she allowed her subjectivity to distort her reality. One can assume with some confidence however that she aimed to exact the Spirit of her subjects through her use of colour and the presentation of form in her works. In her 1955 work Portrait[iii]  (left), she uses bold yellow and blue brush strokes over a dark red and brown background to create the suggestion of an anonymous sitter. Compared to her undated self-portrait titled Self-Portrait[iv](right), it is clear she perceived herself quite differently to her sitter in Portrait. The use of duller colours and more succinct brush strokes in Self-Portrait might suggest she had a less-than passionate view of herself, while the vibrant, even violent feel to Portrait implies a potentially tumultuous or impassioned view of her unnamed sitter. This short comparison highlights how Mead attempted to portray her perception of her subjects and thus how she interpreted Bomberg’s philosophy of the Spirit in the Mass; the different stylistic techniques in her depiction of herself compared to that of her subject is evidence of an attempt to capture the essence and phenomenology of the individual.

[i][i] Roy Oxlade, Bomberg Papers: The Spirit in the Mass, a commentary, together with transcriptions of various previously unpublished notes, p. XIV (introduction), Royal College of Art, 1980

[ii] Cliff Holden, Bomberg’s Teaching – Some Misconceptions, p.3, 2004, Cliff Holden

[iii] Dorothy Mead, Portrait, 1955, Borough Road Gallery Archive

[iv] Dorothy Mead, Self-Portrait, (undated), Borough Road Gallery Archive

Dennis Creffield - Abstraction and Spectral Architecture

Dennis Creffield, Beauvais Cathedral (East End) - 1990

Dennis Creffield - Abstraction and Spiritual Architecture by Fraser McFarlane

The ‘David Bomberg Legacy – The Sarah Rose Collection’, held by the Borough Road Gallery, contains an assortment of works by David Bomberg (1890–1957) and his students from Borough Polytechnic (later London South Bank University). One of these students, Dennis Creffield (1931-2018), is represented by at least fifteen works, typically characterised by monochromatic charcoal markings, with seven taking cathedrals as their subject. These were part of a larger project which gripped Creffield for much of his career, might all too easily be dismissed as simply conservative in their institutionality, or uninteresting in Creffield’s persistent iteration of the theme. However, I would like to reclaim these works from those dangers, and offer interpretations which might in some small way offer a fresh perspective on these works.

The two booklets on Creffield’s cathedral series.

There are taken to be twenty-six remaining examples of medieval cathedrals in England. Constructed between 1040 and 1540, the vast majority of these are built in the Gothic style, which was disseminated across the Channel in the second half of the 1100s, and emphasises height and light with arches and pinnacles. These cathedrals continued to have an enduring impact in subsequent centuries on national identity, and have often been interpreted as living historical testimonies. In 1987, Creffield was commissioned by what was then The Arts Council of Great Britain to draw these cathedrals. This two year undertaking, during which he lived in a campervan, is perhaps the most remarked upon project of Creffield’s life, and it was a foundation towards later artistic exploits, even spurring him to draw the cathedrals of Northern France in 1990. The scarce literature on the subject consists of two small catalogues, French Cathedrals (1991) for the French project and English Cathedrals (1987) for the English antecedent. The latter, published by South Bank Centre, features Creffield's own writing, which resembles both a manifesto and a journal in tone, and provides an account of his road trip in a campervan with little more than an easel and paint. Often composed in the manner of a personal saga or epic, the image conjured resembles that of other (slightly macho) creatives, such as Robert Smithson or Michael Heizer, who embark on pilgrimages to respond to environments and subjects that others might be unaware of: ‘Each day I drew them – each night I slept in their shadow – and their shapes filled my dreams.’1 These cathedrals, though man-made monuments, came, in the relative claustrophobia of England, to be seen as naturalised behemoths, or essential parts of the landscape. Creffield had said of the English Cathedral series ‘it was like wrestling with an endless succession of giants (or angels). And needing to come back each time with a hair from their head.’2 This similarity in attitude between draftsman and land artist brings forth an undercurrent of both, which is a desire to make contact with a supposed deep history, to generate ‘authentic’ experience within a context of encroaching postmodernity.

Fig 1: Dennis Creffield, French Cathedral - No Date

Creffield’s depictions of religious and ecclesiastic buildings housed by Borough Road Gallery (six drawings and one painting) were undoubtedly spurred on by the commission from the Arts Council, but they also differ in many respects. Whilst Creffield continued to make cathedrals his subject well after he finished his Arts Council commission, he was no longer bound to the expectation of an institution whose role it was to promote and appreciate the individual character of each cathedral, or any duty of documentation. Crucially, the lack of duty to a patron afforded a greater degree of freedom in his tendency towards abstraction. This had developed during Creffield’s time as a student of Bomberg at Borough Polytechnic, where Creffield studied modernist expression, claiming he belonged ‘to the progeny of Cezanne’. Rather than create an illusion of reality in a photo-realistic depiction, or a symbol of it by emphasising signification, Creffield tries ‘to find substantial form for [the] substantiality’ of religious buildings, a conjuring of a rawer experience of the weight and immediacy of the medieval behemoths. The impression of this ‘total response’, or what Bomberg elsewhere famously described as ‘the spirit in the mass’, can vary in the extent to which it deconstructs the subject.3 In the Borough collection, Creffield’s French Cathedral (fig. 1) is only loosely defined as a unitary entity amidst its fragmentary structure and diffusion of marks, which is perhaps the reason for its generic title. The only definitely recognisable features are the forms of the pinnacles and jutting out of the mass at the top, and a few short hard marks which distinguish their crockets. This is unlike his depiction of St Paul’s (fig. 2), in which the iconic dome is clearly depicted. Yet both these works’ monochromatic quality and use of charcoal impress upon the viewer a foreboding through their dwindling scale in relation to these structures, and the dynamism of the invisible forces which pervade these buildings and keep them upright against the odds.

Fig 2: Dennis Creffield, St Paul’s Cathedral from Clifford Chance, Aldersgate - 1998

The style of the Gothic was intrinsically linked to the forest; often columns are cosmetically split and carved to look like clusters of tree trunks. Perhaps ironically, Creffield lambasted the ‘English’ tendency of planting trees around cathedrals, likening it to ‘putting a pot-plant in front of a Giotto’. Significantly however, trees offered a relatively lightweight material and were often used in the roofs of cathedrals, which was all too often hazardous to the buildings due to the risk of fires. The Gothic St Paul’s Cathedral, which was later replaced by Christopher Wren’s Baroque design, was a victim of this in 1666 during the Great Fire of London, as was Notre Dame in Paris more recently. The traces of such incidents pervade Creffield’s drawings, which seem to show the buildings as scorched, burnt out and collapsing. Bourges (West Front) (fig. 3) in particular slumps towards the bottom, where the smoky smudged quality solidifies into sketchy marks which look as if they are residual remains after a fire. I appreciate that this reading is not sanctioned by any statement of intent on the part of Creffield, but the smoldering orange which peers out from the rubble certainly makes such a reading enticing. Furthermore, such a link between the cathedrals, forests and fire is historically and artistically richer than one might initially think. The material of charcoal saw a rapid increase in use during the Middle Ages (when these structures were built), primarily for its ability to be burnt at high temperatures efficiently for forging. Creffield’s use of charcoal itself can thus be seen to presence further connotations relating to the ‘Arboreal Gothic’ and fire, contributing to the multi-layered force of the cathedrals’ petrified skeletal forms.

Fig 3: Dennis Creffield, Bourges (West Front), 1990

Fig 4: One of the first photographs taken after the 2019 fire at Notre-Dame de Paris which showed what had survived inside the building.

Fig 5: Photograph of St Paul’s during the Blitz.

Advancing this post-pyrokinetic vein, Borges (West Front), has an uncanny resemblance to the widely viewed image of the altar Notre Dame after the devastating fire of April 2019 (fig. 4). The flurried cascade of marking overlap and entwine as if deconstructing, and resemble pieces of fallen burnt timber. The sense of spatial depth is also similar, with both images creating the sense of still emergent glimmer of something hitherto overwhelmed. Out of context, it would be understandable if Creffield’s drawing was taken to be a response to the image of Notre Dame, though this of course cannot be the case. As with the Notre Dame image, Borges consists of two main compositional features, signalled by a darkening of tone: the lower slumped mass which contains a warm orange flicker within it, and a levitating eminence around the center of the image. The association of these markings with spirituality is comparable with other artworks, notably Francis Bacon’s Innocent X in 1953; the works share a spectrality which dissolves the material contours of a subject but allows its presence to linger.

Fig 6: Plan of the base of the dome of St Paul’s showing the extent to which the rotunda had become warped.

One may elucidate the manner in which Creffield reaches into history with his treatment of these monuments by considering his treatment of the more modern (though Baroque) St Paul’s. Whilst Creffield takes care to allow parts of the paper to peek through and preserve a trace of St Paul’s classical whiteness, much of the lower half has been smudged, evoking the tarry blackness that hundreds of years of London’s smog had left until the buildings deep clean, initiated in 1996. Notably, Creffield has the recognisable and iconic dome climb out of the darker density at the bottom of the composition, in a manner that wields similar language to the famous photograph of St Paul’s during the blitz (fig. 5). Here the leaning and buckling of the dome of St Paul’s suggests (intentionally or not) the restoration work undertaken in the 1920s. Despite many of Christropher Wren’s technical innovations, by the twentieth century, the condition of the dome was beginning to deteriorate, and the survey shown illustrates the extent to which the rotunda was coming under unequal stress from the weight above (fig. 6). The work was nationally discussed, with plenty of visual material that make the usually static dome appear like the leaning tower of Pisa (fig). In the end, the solution was to put a chain belt around the base of the central structure, effectively to ‘cinch’ everything into place. To a contemporary viewer, Creffield’s work thus destabilises and reappraises the structural integrity of St Paul’s in a way that estranges an iconic and familiar image

The works by Creffield in the Borough Road collection which take cathedrals as their subject are boldly different to the other artists and works included. These examples are fertile pastures for interpretation, and the prominence of cathedrals as a collective historical locus only encourages this. Through his use of charcoal, a product of the materials which inspired and then built these cathedrals, Creffield presences a conversation that began before any of us were born. By drawing attention to how the works contain thematic and visual suggestions of recent events and the continuing issues of preservation and conservation of these buildings, I have hoped to show how Creffield’s works continue to be provocative participants in a conversation that will continue long after we pass away. 

1 English Cathedrals (South Bank Centre: London, 1987), 6.

2 Ibid, 6.

3 Bomberg also drew Notre Dame, Chartres and other cathedrals in 1953.

The Kids in Museums Youth Panel ‘Take Over’ Borough Road Gallery

Louisa and Tasha installing Self-Portrait

In November, Borough Road Gallery took part in Kids in Museums Takeover Day https://kidsinmuseums.org.uk/what-we-do/takeover-day/ , when young people take over various roles in museums, galleries and historic sites across the UK.

Borough Road Gallery was taken over by the Kids in Museums Youth Panel, a group of eight young people who work with Kids in Museums staff and trustees to improve the access and inclusivity of museums for other young people. The gallery was one of 175 venues that took part in Takeover Day this year, with others including the Museum of London, National Museum Cardiff and York Minister.

The Youth Panel decided to take over Borough Road Gallery after two members, Holly and Tasha, ran the gallery’s social media accounts for Kids in Museums Teen Digital Takeover Day https://kidsinmuseums.org.uk/what-we-do/teen-digital-takeover/ in August. Afterwards, the Panel decided it would be fun to run our own event Pose: Making and Taking Portraits at the gallery for the next Takeover Day, appealing to people of a similar age to us.

“After working so hard as a team to plan and orchestrate our very own Takeover Day, it was great to see our ideas come into fruition. It felt like we were given such a big responsibility, which was really empowering and it allowed for us to be creative.” - Holly

The Panel collectively chose which two artworks from the London South Bank University collections should be on display for the event. We decided on Bent Figure by Edna Mann and Self-Portrait by Dorothy Mead. These artworks were chosen to showcase the works of women in the Borough Group and to “increase the profile of artists that often get lost in the vast discourse of art history”. Mann’s use of charcoal and portrayal of movement in Bent Figure inspired the theme and main activity of our Takeover Day. The Panel was divided into teams to carry out the following roles in preparation for the event:

• Pre-event audience research

• Planning logistics

• Marketing and comm

• Curation and installation

• Post-event research

Eight people based across the country collaborating on one event is not an easy task. After hours of video conferencing, endless WhatsApp-ing and exhausting a Google Drive folder, the event was ready to go.

The event started with a charcoal drawing activity led by artist Jenny Bell. Three participants held different poses portraying movement, while everyone else had to draw the participants with charcoal without looking at their paper. After lots of laughter at the outcomes, these were all showcased on the wall of the gallery alongside the works of Edna Mann and Dorothy Mead.

Other activities from the day included a talk from the curator at Borough Road Gallery and two Youth Panel members, Louisa and Tasha, who were part of the curation team. This included a ‘two truths and a lie’ game about the artists, the background of the art and why the Youth Panel chose each artwork. A photo booth area was also set up in the gallery for movement-inspired selfies.

Youth Panel member Chloe said: “A highlight was taking part in the drawing workshop. It was interesting to experience an approach to drawing where careful observation was the objective, rather than creating a masterpiece.”

Reflections from the Panel also included potential improvements, like marketing the event sooner and choosing a theme that is more relevant to young people.

In November 2020 Kids in Museums will celebrate the tenth anniversary of Takeover Day with a week-long Takeover Day Festival. To find out more and how to get involved, visit www.kidsinmuseums.org.uk/takeoverday

Tasha Brown, Kids in Museums Youth Panel member

Curator talk

Youth Panel in the photo booth

Female Modern British Artists Wikipedia Editathon: My Experience

Female Modern British Artists Wikipedia Editathon: My Experience

For me, like most people I would guess, Wikipedia is an information source that I consult weekly if not daily. I don’t think it’d be a stretch to say that most of us would be a lot more lost without it. With it being such a wealth of information and so readily available, I easily forget that each and every Wikipedia entry is written by a living, breathing person. The editathon served to remind me that this free font of knowledge, is a human product that has taken care and effort by a community of editors around the world. So in being reminded of that, it was nice to be able to give back by contributing something myself.

I was quite shocked to learn that only 17% of the 1.5 million Wiki biographies written in English are of women. I want to thank Borough Road Gallery and Wikimedia, for providing an opportunity to contribute to the changing of that statistic.

The process of writing the article was harder than I had thought it would be. I chose to write about Rachel Nicholson and was surprised to find a very private individual with very little online presence - this coupled with the need for authoritative sources made the beginning of the writing experience a little frustrating. By the end of the editathon, I’d made progress and gained even more appreciation for the efforts of Wikipedia editors.

All in all, it was a very wholesome experience. As a young freelance creative just starting out, I’m feeling the pressure to specialise, to tie myself to one area of expertise, when all I want to be doing is experimenting. It was somewhat serendipitous that I stumbled upon Rachel Nicholson among a long list of names; Nicholson didn’t become a painter until she was in her forties. Being the daughter of two famous artists, she resisted the pressures to become an artist until it was right for her. Learning this was reassuring and calmed a few of my ‘recent graduate jitters’.

I didn’t quite get to finish my piece, and as all articles go through a checking process, a Wiki bio of Rachel Nicholson is still “coming soon”. I’d really encourage anyone who has some spare time, to get editing an article themselves because it’s such a simple and easy process, only requiring time and interest in the subject matter.

Lennie.

www.lenniehoward.co.uk

Instagram: @lenniehoward

Review of Breathing in the Borough Archive in Garageland

Abigail Ashford finds herself in the company of a chihuahua whilst following Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that the aura of a painting can be physically inhaled into the body at an installation by Accounts & Records.

'Stroke the cat. It doesn’t matter if it turns into a dog'. So reads a line from Edwina Attlee’s poem Bourges, which accompanied the recent installation Breathing in the Borough Road Archive at The Borough Road Gallery. Enjoy the kind of pleasant sensation you get from an action like stroking a small furry animal. It doesn’t matter if it mutates and changes form dramatically. The tactile pleasure is still there, so make the most of it. At least that’s what I took away from both the poem and the installation. Exhibitions that deal with archives can often enshrine the original artifact and beg us to consider its value in poor lighting behind a glass case, the surrounding walls crowded with textual evidence of its legitimacy. A work such as Breathing in offers an alternative to this genre and mode of display, focusing instead on personal, physiological encounters with objects, using the paintings and drawings of The Borough Road Group, led by artist David Bomberg in the mid-20th century, as a starting point.

The Borough Road Gallery is an unassuming space, tucked away in a campus building of London South Bank University. Here, at the old Borough Polytechnic, David Bomberg held his discursive life-drawing classes, encouraging students and fellow artists such as Dorothy Mead, Edna Mann, Cliff Holden and Dennis Creffield to move away from the stifling academic traditions of British art schools. Small holes pepper the plaster walls of the gallery’s single room, left by overzealous photography students erecting degree shows. The space sits empty for extended periods, the collection it was built to display sitting in storage, while the university concentrates its resources elsewhere.

At the opening, I stroke a chihuahua called Wolfgang as he determinedly tries to sit on a circular carpet in the centre of the space, woven to emulate the prints covering the walls. The pockmarked walls have been covered in a myriad of blue and white sheets, which I recognise as the result of water printing, a staple in many a child’s primary education. The simple palette, grace and scale of the work is much more calmly orchestrated than your average kid in art class, though I’m still drawn to stare into the swirling patterns, mesmerised and soothed. The clouds of ink mutate from marble, to water, to a brain scan in a sort of oddly relaxing Rorschach test. Oblong gaps cut out of the paper evoke the paintings conspicuously missing from the walls. Paintings from the archive are instead leant against another wall dressed in fresh pink packing and bubble wrap cocoons, held together with tape declaring them FRAGILE. Which works these are and by which artists is not disclosed. The composition visualises the problems of funding and visibility the collection faces, but literally repackages the artworks in the quirky spatial language of installation art for a contemporary art viewing public. 

Explaining the difficulties of caring for an often-invisible body of work the collection’s curator Theresa Kneppers tells me that although most collections deal with the issue of work being in storage in light of space and conservation parameters, this is a somewhat unique case for her. Unable to display the paintings at all, she has embraced this as an opportunity to invite artists to respond to the hibernating collection, encouraging them to redress and represent ideas surrounding the material and conceptual archive. Another recent show titled And I Paused saw artist e.t. life projects explore a dialogue between the arrangement of complex thoughts in the human brain and ordered archival systems, drawing on her own experience of dyspraxia and dyslexia. 

Theresa tells me that she commissioned Breathing in with the aim of 'addressing the body in the gallery as something beyond just the visual interaction with the displayed artwork.' Such thinking has shaped the collection from its outset. Sarah Rose, who donated the archive to the university, has written of her close attention to breathing when viewing paintings, passionately comparing the effect of a moving painting to an induced meditation that affects the nervous system, so that the viewer 'not only “sees” the work but also feels it'. The attempt to theorise, explain, use and influence our neural engagements with art has long been explored but has remained somewhat peripheral to the art world; think of Goethe’s speculative colour psychology, or the modern practice of art therapy by psychotherapists. 

However, in their installation, artists Braden and Angela from the Accounts & Records collective, propose a new theory. The catchily titled Insufflation Appreciation asserts that, 'with the right guidance, what Walter Benjamin describes as the “aura” of a painting can be physically inhaled into the body.' They suggest that through such inhalation, the viewer might then empathise with a work of art on a metabolic rather than purely visual level. Playing with the notion of innate essence and originality by conceptualising the 'aura' as a microscopic residue, they describe how 'from the blood, the aura particulate travels up to the brain where it triggers acute and profound synaptic responses.' An audio meditation plays in the gallery to accompany the installation, designed to stimulate this process and release the paintings from the confines of their bubble wrapped obscurity. 

As a creative new interpretation of a little-known collection consigned to the storeroom, the piece works fantastically. By evoking many people’s naïve childhood interaction with creating (what at the time seemed a deeply personal image by pressing paper onto inked water), and viewing art, the artists have created a playful response far removed from serious and often stifling norms of aesthetic contemplation. The audio meditation provides an additional humorous reimagining of the much-scorned gallery audio-guide, and simultaneously taps into the app-based mindfulness and podcasting zeitgeist of the present day, directing us to absorb art viscerally as well as visually. And so, arguably, we can stroke the cat and the dog at the same time. In other words, Breathing in the Borough Road Archive suggests that it is important to continually celebrate the cultural category of the archive but also to broaden its scope and reach concurrently. 

Abigail Ashford

Breathing in the Borough Road Archive

The Borough Road Gallery
London SE1
11-13 April 2019

http://garagelandmagazine.blogspot.com/2019/05/breathing-in-borough-road-archive.html?m=1

Impressions of a Dorothy Mead's Self-Portrait by Fae Morgan

Self Portrait, Dorothy Mead (1928-1975)

A close-up shot of an acrylic painting that is a part of "A David Bomberg Legacy - The Sarah Rose Collection".

The painting is the head and shoulders of a woman, Dorothy Mead, who was a British painter. David Bomberg was her long-time teacher and mentor, his style influencing some of her early works, included dense, thick brushstrokes.

David Bomberg was a British painter best known for his rash, experimental works. World War I and its aftermath severely impacted Bomberg, and in the interwar period, he instead began working primarily on more traditional landscape paintings, reminiscent of Post-Impressionist art. 

What’s intriguing about this painting is that is doesn’t even look like a portrait of a woman, there are no facial features to help indicate whether it’s a man or a woman. You can only tell what the clothes, hair and skin are, thanks to the colouration. The title of the portrait alongside the artist’s name are what tell us it’s a portrait of a woman.

The thick use of paint is very clear in some areas of the painting, from where the brushstrokes end, as the paint was pushed to the end of their stroke and left there. The blue section of the body which represents the clothing that Dorothy Mead was wearing, looks to by a robe of some kind.

In the close-up shot you can see the strokes of either the paintbrush or the scalpel that was used in transferring the paint onto the canvas. The blue being the boldest colour out of the mixed grays and creams. The blue reminds me of a sea or water coming into a cove, with the mixed grays and creams being the cliffs or ground either side of the section of water. If the grays and creams are acting as the ground and if this was the full painting; then there aren’t many places where the ground would be pale. So, the painting could represent water existing in an unnatural place. The darkest shade of grey separates the blue from the pale colour.

-Fae Morgan, Gallery Intern