NOTD: Inspired by Rothko

Hello!!

Today's challenge in the Crumpet's Nail Tarts 33 day challenge is Abstract. I decided to combine this with the last week of my Llama Nails 'Inspired By An Artist' challenge, which I am really, really late for--the last prompt in that challenge is 'Your Favorite Artist'. Also, this week's theme in my Kimber's challenge is 'Rainbow', and this has that as well--don't you love it when things come together??

I have a lot of favorite artists, but most of them were already covered by the challenge. There are many other artists I'd like to honor--including a reader request I had--so, I have decided to keep this an on-going thing on my blog. It won't necessarily happen every week or even every two weeks, but it will be a recurring theme.

In light of that, I decided I wanted to go a slightly different direction for this one, and honor a particular movement that means a lot to me. I talked a lot about how Impressionism was what led me to an understanding of modern art, how I became fascinated by the shift to looking at atmospheric effects themselves as the subject matter of the works. Abstract art is the logical end-point of that shift--where actual content itself is gone, and the impact of the medium itself--by this I mean color, light, positioning--becomes the subject matter. To loosely quote from Brideshead Revisited, what a camera cannot do that an artist can is 'capture the meaning of the content, or the emotion that elements of it evoke'. Abstract art seeks to evoke meaning and emotion without reference to any recognizable 'content' that comes with previous associations.

The height of this for me was when I saw an exhibition with white squares of canvas, each that had a white swipe of paint across them. As I got closer I realized each of the 'white' squares and swipes were slightly different, and the work was studying how they changed when paired with one another. I can't for the life of me remember who the artist was that did it (if you know, please help me), so I picked the closest set of works that have the same goal, paintings by one of my favorite artists, Mark Rothko. Here is a sample of the type of thing I'm talking about:

What do you feel when you look at that? Do you feel warm and happy? Or do you feel sad and scared? There is no traditional 'subject' in this work. What the artist is trying to do is evoke emotion through certain colors and by the pairing of certain colors together. This type of thing is sometimes done over a series of panels, where one color is paired with various colors, to explore how the emotional impact of that color varies depending on its partner.

For my manicure, I did my own study of one particular color, China Glaze Red Satin, against several other colors:

China Glaze Red Satin over Zoya Darcy (index), Zoya Arizona (middle), China Glaze Trendsetter (ring), China Glaze Call Of The Wild (pinkie)

Take a look at each finger in turn. Look at the red on the index finger versus the pinkie finger? How do these make you feel? To me, the index finger looks warm and inviting, like a happy summer day. The pinkie feels much colder to me, forbidding, almost scary.

I don't know if my nail version of this type of art was successful or not, but I enjoyed making it, and I hope you enjoyed looking at it!

Thanks for looking, and have an awesome Wednesday,
M.