Hard Rain and Mary Hambleton
If someone had walked up to me on Monday and asked me if I enjoyed abstract art in general, my answer would have been “No,” and after viewing Hambleton exhibit, my answer is still no. I general do not connect to very abstract pieces on an emotional or aesthetic level. However, this does not mean that I cannot see the merit in such pieces. When I initially viewed the exhibit, the only thing I knew about the artist or the exhibit was that the artist had cancer when she made many of the pieces, and that one painting was named after a Bob Dylan song. I am glad that I chose to view them with little background at first, because it allowed me to see them though solely my eyes and form my own first impressions.
My general reaction to the exhibit, after I had seen them all once, was, “These are very ambiguous, and many are just plain confusing.” The only painting I liked for purely aesthetic reasons was Quench; it was the only one I would consider putting in my house (if I had a house). I don’t know why this is—perhaps it is simply my affection for the color blue. Although, my general feeling for the exhibit was confusion, there were a few pieces that I thought were relatively unambiguous. Enough was simple—enough. Anger and frustration almost oozed from the work. This is perhaps the only piece that has a seemingly clear message from just looking at the piece and knowing the title. The rest of the exhibit was much more ambiguous to me. Yes, the use of the PET scans and extinct animals certainly transmits a certain feel to the pieces they are included in, but there is far from a set interpretation. Do these mean fear, regret, and a sense of similarity; are they supposed to evoke sympathy? While I do not know about the first few, I do not think that these paintings were meant to pull sympathy. I just do not get that feeling from them. It seems more to me like, “This is how I feel right now, these are things that have occupied my mind recently, and this is what those thought look like.” However, this is just my opinion.
After I viewed the whole exhibit I sat and read the essay by Bell. This essay did allow me to look at certain pieces in a new light. The greatest change for me came from Waiting for the Miracle. I had originally passed this one without much thought. However, going back and seeing the apparent movement in the middle, and the progression on top, I did get a much better sense of the waiting and how painful that could be.
There were a few things that I did not quite understand in Bell. First, what seems like (to me, again just my interpretation) an implication that anything related to games, bright color, or blocks was playful or hopeful. While I understand that in the context of these works, these things may indeed represent optimistic and hopeful things, it irks me that it seems as though just because Hambleton began using these certain elements that means she had begun to be more optimistic. I have seen the use of games and bright “happy” colors to transmit pain or confusion or any other emotion commonly portrayed as negative. Even more relevant, the genre of abstract art is so ambiguous and subject to interpretation that any such assertions are going to seem very restrictive. Second—and this is a much smaller matter—was the assertion that Hard Rain was less subtle than the other works of Hambleton. I now know a significant amount the piece and the artist and it is still subtle and up for interpretation for me. This is probably just an argument in semantics—what do I consider subtle and what does Bell consider subtle—but I thought it was worth a mention.