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“Love More” by Rebecca Partridge
At first glance my eyes were immediately drawn to the plain white centre, moving past all the detail of colours and shapes. This intrigued me as the colours are so bright and vibrant yet that wasn’t first thing to catch my eye. The artist used subtractive colours and by starting with them being really faint around the outside it enabled her to layer and mix them together. This created a huge range of tones gradually getting closer to black and in the process becoming a lot brighter. I think the bright colours in this piece are used to create a huge contrast with the plain background. When you look at the white background around the outside of the shapes it looks quite dull, but when you look at the white in the centre it’s almost glowing and seems much brighter although it’s exactly the same. Rebecca Partridge has not used colour perception in the usual way to create emotions and feelings. Instead by using a huge range of colours, tones, shades and hues she has tricked our eyes so that they perceive colours and see them differently depending on the situation.
“When I was very young I had synaesthetic dreams. I dreamt of white spaces in which there were these simple, bright geometric forms moving round a centre point that dissolved into a dark chaos. I would then wake up as if I’d had a nightmare.” Quote Rebecca Partridge [http://www.rebeccapartridge.com/Writing]
I feel her synaesthetic dreams were the reason she paints in this way, as she wants to draw attention to the fear she felt of the ‘dark chaos’. By drawing our eyes immediately there, she’s confused us because we would expect to be looking at the bright colours first. Instead we’re locked staring at this thing she was always afraid of instead of colourful, simple shapes.
She said the shapes in her dreams were moving and I think she has accomplished this sense of movement in her painting. The use of smooth shapes has helped with this dramatically because if she used ones with corners or edges they would create a static feel, whereas the cylindrical shapes she has chosen curve round and don’t really have an end. Also the use of layering colours and blending them together where the shapes overlap make them seem more like one and they merge together. This way when you look at the painting your eyes keep moving round the shapes as the colours bleed into each other so much. This is quite a clever technique because obviously she couldn’t have the painting moving but has managed to keep our eyes moving around the range of colours instead.
Overall, colour is not the main aspect of this piece but it is the most important because if it wasn’t bright and colourful the piece would not have the same meaning at all. This is an interesting approach to using colour and when looking at the piece in more depth I realised it wasn’t how I first saw it but think that Rebecca Partridge has used her own experiences to create a really interesting painting.
