Art and Eye

  My eye is drawn to an overall sense of darkness. The monochrome palette made up of charcoal and pastel sucks the viewer in, plunging them into the canvas and echoing the title of the piece. This is foregrounded by Johns' stencilling of the word Diver on the bottom left hand corner of the piece, barely visible against the murky colours. The capitalisation of the word seems like a warning - do not be pulled under. Diver has been interpreted to be Johns paying homage to the suicide of Hart Crane, an American poet who jumped overboard a ship in the 1930s, his body never being recovered. With this interpretation in mind, both the dark colour palette and warning label below the anchor shape depicted are even more emotionally effective.  If Johns is referencing Crane's suicide, he takes the human element of the painting further. Johns said that he wanted to convey the idea of a 'swan dive' through this depiction. Despite an overall darkness, there are graceful movements to t

  The eye-opening exhibition of woodcuts by artist Helen Frankenthaler at Dulwich Picture Gallery from 15 Sept 2021-18 April 2022 encouraged a closer look by the eye at this often neglected medium. Obvious images that come to mind from the word 'woodcut' might be associated with Albrecht Durer or the works of the German Expressionists. But Frankenthaler goes a stage further, giving her woodcuts a radical yet beautiful twist, as the title of the exhibition so aptly described. Right at the start of the exhibition, the eye is engulfed by Freefall.  Already the name of the piece resonates with an amateur studying woodcuts; the viewer plunges themselves into the abyss of this relatively underexplored medium, freefalling into the mind of the artist herself. The title also implies a freedom of expression. As a prominent second generation Abstract Expressionist and pioneer of the colour-field painting technique, Frankenthaler's better-known paintings tend to evoke a feeling rather