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from WelSpotted
Color
English physicist Sir Isaac Newton is credited with discovering color when, in the 1660s, he experimented with sunlight and prisms and demonstrated that clear white light was composed of seven visible hues: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Newton also noted that in the spectrum, each color bleeds into its neighbor, creating endless colorways—a fact wonderfully apparent in artist Kathleen Ryan’s massive, moldy fruit sculptures. “The sculptures are beautiful and pleasurable, but there’s an ugliness and unease that comes with them,” she said in an interview with the New York Times . While each gem—rich striated emerald green malachite, pale, milky iridescent opal, smoky quartz and others—is hard and lustrous, amassed together they simulate fuzzy colonies of mold— in particular, the garden-variety fungus known as green rot that can be found on food languishing in your crisper or fruit and veggie drawers (that’s Penicillium digitatum to you, Smarty Pants). Ryan starts with a foam base, where she paints “fresh” versus “rotten” areas on the surface. Then she places each gemstone, using an assortment of shapes, sizes, and colors, to emulate “the shift from desirable to disgusting,” rhapsodizes www.colossal.com.
Lemons are a favorite subject, but the artist, New York-based but born in Santa Monica, also creates rotting oranges, pears, cherries, and melons. Kathleen’s work first made the gallery scene a few years back, when “Bad Peach” served as a namesake piece for a group show at the Francois Ghebaly gallery in Los Angeles. The Times , writing about the artist in a feature in T Magazine , notes that the sculptures’ opulence and over-ripeness recall the partially consumed fruit of 17th-century Dutch paintings by masters such as Jan Davidsz de Heem and Willem Claesz Heda. If you’re in a Googling mood, check out Heda’s tablescapes, which are particularly ruinous, and scenes from Heem, which incorporate lush arrangements and…lobsters). We were VERY interested to note that while Kathleen uses dazzling stones to depict the rot in her sculptures, she uses simple glass beads for the pristine parts.
