Lyn and I spent an afternoon during our Thanksgiving break with our friend Hyunmee Lee’s new paintings in Santa Fe, an exhibition called “Epochal Dimensions.” We have lived for a decade with three of Hyunmee’s paintings. I wrote about the large black-on-white painting chunji-changjo / Heaven and earth a few years ago HERE. The smaller paintings were a gift when Hyunmee left Utah for Santa Fe.
It is one thing to see and even live with a painting, quite another to see a painting in the context of other paintings done during the same 6-month period. It was enlightening to stand between and before and behind the paintings of “Epochal Dimensions.” In the midst of the large paintings that make up the new exhibition, I witnessed variations on a theme: black box or blob or even triangle plus cyan box or blob or slash plus yellow impulses and even lavender touches connected and commented on by lines of black—all on a canvas painted and overpainted with white. Look at the various positions of the black. Of the cyan. Of the pale yellow. Of the lavender. See how them move from canvas to canvas. They move! They rearrange themselves. They speak with one another: This! And this! But this! No, this! Why not this? Each painting fascinating with its own complexities. Together they were magical.
For images on the gallery site, click HERE
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About Scott Abbott
I received my Ph.D. in German Literature from Princeton University in 1979. Then I taught at Vanderbilt University, BYU, and Utah Valley State College. At Utah Valley University, I directed the Program in Integrated Studies for its initial 13 years and was also Chair of the Department of Humanities and Philosophy for three years. My publications include a book on Freemasonry and the German Novel, two co-authored books with Zarko Radakovic (REPETITIONS and VAMPIRES & A REASONABLE DICTIONARY, published in Serbo-Croatian in Belgrade and in English with Punctum Books), a book with Sam Rushforth (WILD RIDES AND WILDFLOWERS, Torrey House Press), a "fraternal meditation" called IMMORTAL FOR QUITE SOME TIME (University of Utah Press), and translations of three books by Austrian author Peter Handke, of an exhibition catalogue called "The German Army and Genocide," and, with Dan Fairbanks, of Gregor Mendel's important paper on hybridity in peas. More famously, my children are in the process of creating good lives for themselves: as a model and dance/yoga studio manager, as a teacher of Chinese language, as an ecologist and science writer, as a jazz musician, as a parole officer, as a contractor, as a seasonal worker (Alaska and Park City, Utah), and as parents. I share my life with UVU historian Lyn Bennett, with whom I have written a cultural history of barbed wire -- THE PERFECT FENCE (Texas A&M University Press). Some publications at http://works.bepress.com/scott_abbott/
THE GOALIE'S ANXIETY 