Let’s look for
instance at Three Miners in a Cage
(hereafter Cage). The function of
this painting is clearly not representational realism – the real constriction
of cage travel arose from the mass of miners that travelled the cage at once
and McGuinness captures that constriction but reduces his miners to three. This
‘Trinity’, and we should never forget Tom’s Catholicism, become a means of
filling all available picture-space and the cage with a kind of abstract
geometry, using, like Hewer and valorised by Kandinsky, mainly partial triangles.
Look at my attempt for instance to reduce the shapes to linearity below. It is pure figural Kandinsky (even the triangle motif) - even down to his White ZigZags (1922):
This contrast
between a live image and its reduction to abstraction is not meant to simplify
our path to meaning (it denotes a symbol rather than an allegory) but it does
reveal one source of the rhythms and repetitions in the picture space, which
have pictorially a right to left direction and create directional pull between
top and bottom edges that is tense visually and restless. Here both abstraction
and formal composition convey motion – the cage falls and the miners resist the downward force.
The collapse caused by downward pressure is countered by the men’s resistance
to it in the rightwards dynamic.
Three Miners In a Cage - A Tom McGuiness etching
THROWN OUT OF THE EMA!
Let’s look for instance at Three Miners in a Cage (hereafter Cage). The function of this painting is clearly not representational realism – the real constriction of cage travel arose from the mass of miners that travelled the cage at once and McGuinness captures that constriction but reduces his miners to three. This ‘Trinity’, and we should never forget Tom’s Catholicism, become a means of filling all available picture-space and the cage with a kind of abstract geometry, using, like Hewer and valorised by Kandinsky, mainly partial triangles. Look at my attempt for instance to reduce the shapes to linearity below. It is pure figural Kandinsky (even the triangle motif) - even down to his White ZigZags (1922):
This contrast between a live image and its reduction to abstraction is not meant to simplify our path to meaning (it denotes a symbol rather than an allegory) but it does reveal one source of the rhythms and repetitions in the picture space, which have pictorially a right to left direction and create directional pull between top and bottom edges that is tense visually and restless. Here both abstraction and formal composition convey motion – the cage falls and the miners resist the downward force. The collapse caused by downward pressure is countered by the men’s resistance to it in the rightwards dynamic.
All the best
Steve