Nash Gallery Reflection
The pastel on paper drawing by Viola Frey portrayed a woman and a man sitting on the floor of their home. I felt that it was full of emotion because there was a wide variety of color scattered in fragments throughout the piece and I felt that multiple moods were being expressed at the same time – anger, frustration and sadness. It felt very intimate, as if I were invading on a private domestic quarrel which the man and woman were so caught up in they didn’t even care to notice people were watching. Similarly in the picture, there were spectators in the window and door that didn’t seem to be expecting to walk in on them. I also felt like there was a power struggle between the man and woman and it seemed like both of them wanted to just curl up and revert back to being children and not have to deal with the issues in their adult lives.
In the Nancy Randall drawing titled “The Crossing,” I felt very calm and peaceful from looking at it. Across the top were a series of pictures that seemed to be telling an ancient story about the Vikings. The bottom ¾ was somewhat of a collage of canoes, insects, birds and flowers that made it feel like the scene was being preserved in time because of the overlapping figures and the way some images were fading out or were very distant. It was a graphite and pastel drawing on Japanese handmade paper so it felt like it had a very warm and comfortable feeling to it. The mediums used gave it a delicate quality and presented it in a kind of soft yellow light that reminded me of being in the middle of an empty field immersed in sunlight.