Nuts & Bolts of the NUNUM Aesthetic Part 5

The Soil

Continuing on with the example of our little girl and her bicycle but now twenty-some years in the future when she is a young woman in her mid-twenties recently graduated from her undergraduate studies and presently taking a year off to enjoy herself and think before deciding what to do for graduate school. During this time, she has taken a job as an assistant to an assistant at an art gallery, which while not paying very well, does at least somewhat satisfy her desire for an interesting workplace while she mulls her study options. Then one random day at work, she is helping to install a new exhibition of a young artist whose work is very heavily tilted towards the abstract. 

She, being new to this world, is mostly silent while her co-workers ramble on about this and that concerning the different pieces they have already hung on the walls. After all, for her a four-foot by six-foot panel painted half-green and half-blue brought to mind nothing but the sky and the earth. Actually, there have been moments when she had to keep her face hidden from the others when they turned something like that blue and green painting into a statement on the improvability of the existence of man. Then after everything had been hung and all that was left to do was a little cleaning up our not so little girl takes a seat to catch her breath and look at what they have done. And, that is when it happens.

​It is a longer piece, eight feet in length by only two feet in height and at first glance, a completely red canvass save a small jagged black circle in the top right corner. It catches her attention, and with this comes the realization the red is not a solid opaque pigment but rather is a textured spectrum of red, which seem to thicken outwardly as it darkens and falls back into the painting as it lightens. This ebb and flow of color transmit a sensation of motion to her and she starts to find the subtlety of it hypnotic. Then after a while, her eyes find the black spot and she closes her eyes and shakes her head slightly. “Are you tired?” Her boss asks. She answers no, puts it out of her mind, and finishes-up an hour later with everyone else. That night lying in bed, after three glasses of wine and a shower, she starts to cry as she opens her eyes so that she can stop seeing the image of her father’s casket being lowered into the ground.

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