|

with frame 34 3/4" x 42 1/4"
Kyu Nam Han said:
'This is a rock and roll landscape. Don't you
think it is rocking?'
:
At that time I was interested in the proximities
of grids in painting:,
line, color, form, etc.
Many people might not understand what the term
'proximity' means.
Let's put it this way: it is a kind of planar
relationship, like a membrane.
First, one layer,
then another layer,
and then a third layer;
like dimensions--
Incompatible dimensions of different worlds.
Contradictory, contrasting layers.
By combining and overlapping these layers, one
can turn painting itself into a musical state.
----------
In
reality I had been between heaven and hell
during this time--
'When We Dead Awaken,' as Henrik Ibsen properly
put it.
As a result, painting was my sole comfort and
outlet;
the only thing that gave me a moment to myself
to breathe and return to a collected state of
mind, body, and spirit.
It was at this time, with my energy split
between Seoul and New York, that I, nearly dead,
awoke.
There are myriad good things and bad things that
I could tell you about this pivotal time in my
life:
two extreme opposites that ironically came
together to live in harmony.
It was bustling Christmas season when I first
came to see Mondrian's 'Broadway Boogie Woogie'
in person at the MoMA.
On the way back to the studio, I had a
temptation to buy stretcher bars and canvases
for my newly inspired paintings:
These took about two years to complete:

---------------
Broadway Boogie Woogie by Piet
Mondrian

Escaping to New York after the start of World
War II, Mondrian delighted in the city's
architecture, and, an adept dancer, was
fascinated by American jazz, particularly
boogie–woogie. He saw the syncopated beat,
irreverent approach to melody, and
improvisational aesthetic of boogie–woogie as
akin to his own "destruction of natural
appearance; and construction through continuous
opposition of pure means—dynamic rhythm." Bands
of stuttering chromatic pulses, paths of red,
yellow, and blue interrupted by light gray
suggest the city's grid and the movement of
traffic, while the staccato vibration of colors
evokes the syncopation of jazz and the blinking
electric lights of Broadway
|