Posted by Sophia Gates on December 19, 1998 at 11:25:39:
In Reply to: The Reason: posted by James Allen on December 19, 1998 at 08:46:32:
This (Eagle Group Torba) is my favorite piece in the entire salon. I think it is an extremely powerful work of art which demonstrates an amazing command of space. I agree with John Howe and Jim Allen that the drawing of the minor guls was no accident. Of course they could have been more "perfectly" drawn. She obviously knew how, but chose to make them light, sketchy, insubstantial. They help balance the mass of the major guls while enriching the negative space that surrounds them. At the same time, they are sufficiently light and subtle not to interfere or cause a struggle for dominance with the other elements in the composition. Moreover, the off-center, shifting quality of these guls might suggest an ephemeral, transitory idea - the passage of time, the phases of the moon.
Painters do this sort of thing all the time! Sometimes, they do it just for the hell of it. A big part of art is play and a huge part of the creative process is "mistakes". In fact, give me the artist any time with the courage to push the envelope and make a mistake. Why shouldn't a weaver have the right to do the same thing? Why shouldn't we respect her for it?
This piece has a very lunar, otherworldly look to it - how would that have been improved by precise, sharply detailed, "perfect" minor guls?
I do not know if these guls were intended to be mysterious in the sense that Jim conveys - intentionally misleading. It is certainly possible; on the other hand they may simply have been a very personal sort of amulet, a mantra. But they are mysterious nevertheless, subtle and intriguing. And they suit the visual composition they are a part of, perfectly!
If these guls were "mistakes", they were the mistakes of a genius.