Critique based response to 'Feelings for Petals'

Yeon Bae Jung

jyb5100@hanmail.net

Critique based response to Feelings for Petals

COMM 2900 Communication for Visual Artists

Submitted to Rooney Jean

November 21, 2013

 

Grouping many kinds of artworks around the world, we can find the main streams and their specific styles that artists have used. one of these techniques is black and white ink drawing. This has always been of great interest to me because I love the ink drawing and it requires no more than a pen with ink. Moreover, it is easy to approach and draw regardless of time and place. I use this process myself when a good idea occurs to me. It is immediate and accessible.

One day I surfed in the website of the Richard Heller Gallery and found some artworks that caught my attention. Those were Ernesto Caivano's works. The one that gave me a great emotion was Feelings for Petals.  It was one of most famous Ernesto Caivano's works and was introduced as Feelings for Petals dated 2009. Its dimensions are 11.5 x 7.5 Inches. It was created with the mediums of Ink and Graphite on paper. The basic graphical element of this work is fine line work. With it Caivano describes shapes using light & shade on gray background.

On the website Caivano gives a statement of his work for Feelings for Petals. Ernesto Caivano was born Madrid, Spain in 1972 and lived and worked in New York. His education was an MFA, from Columbia University, New York, 2001, and a BFA from The Cooper Union, New York, 1999.  He is known for his fantastical, narrative-based ink drawings and his natural storytelling approach. Stylistically, Caivano's intricate drawings borrow from art nouveau, modernist abstraction, oriental prints, and fractal geometry. 

Feelings for Petals was described with the lines of ink pen and darkness of graphite on gray background. It is a pure monotone image. In the painting, there are two subjects, a hand and a tree. The tree has branches with blossoms, which are so simple. The background is also simple as it has a soft gray tone. The work is suggested that human being and nature meet each other and have mutual response on the universal space. The gray background might express the universal space; it is a kind metaphor. Because of the foreshortening method that was used in the angel of the drawing, the hand and tree look alive and appear to be touching each other. This makes the whole image even more fantastical. It seems as if the viewers hand could touch tree branches on the paper and they and the tree and the drawn hand could become one. Overall compositionally these two subjects in the simple background have good balance and active movement.

Artworks with black and white such as ancient oriental painting, usually give viewers calmness, purity, or spirituality. on the contrary, when I look at Feelings for Petals, which has the same style, I feel different contradictory emotions such as inner change, violent emotion, or active movements.

Lets look at Ernesto Caivano’s works, in comparison to one of Korea’s famous artists, Young Kim. Kim has drawn nature and traditional buildings with only pen and black ink. His work reminds me of Caivano’s. Both artists, while evoking different feelings used the same. Young Kim describes realistic nature and traditional buildings, but Ernesto Caivano describes the relationship or the emotion between nature and human.

I love Ernesto Caivano's works because I think that the emotion conveyed in his work is better than only describing realistic images. Feelings for Petals expresses the touch and sympathy between human and tree successfully. As a conclusion, the strongest emotion I feel from the painting is that the two subjects in the painting, hand and tree branches with blossoms look like alive and are one body and both now touch and sympathize each other. 

References:

1.      Website: www. Ernestocaivanno.com

2.      Website: www. Richardhellergallery.com

 

 

Ernesto Caivano’s Feelings for Petals, 2009, 11.5x7.5 Inches, Ink and Graphite on paper

 

 

 

 

 

 

Young T. Kim’s Sosusuwon Building of Busuk Temple, between 2000 and 2010, Pen with Ink on paper