Dee Sanchez: Night Suns

This piece displays two bouquets: one made of the sunflowers and another of the vigorous and cheerful colors. While the blossoms boisterously occupy the center, they themselves become the centerpiece of the color bunch. Together they inspire with vivaciousness and effervescence. Compositionally, perspective also feeds this influx: the artist boldly juxtaposes the fore to the background, making the visual transition effortless and inviting. Consequently, ladders and steps become the leitmotif of this piece. The fence near the bottom resembles the appliance and the gradation of the hills' color, along with the calculated descent (or ascent) suggests a graduated progression.

This is also a very musical piece: the poles of the fence are the fingerboards, the lines are he strings, while the flowers pose as sound holes. The ladder, in turn, can be the xylophone to add some rhythm. This could seem like a strained comparison, but the painting radiates such strong rhythmic waves -- be they of color and geometry -- that eventually they transpose into the realm of sound, at least on the mental level. Accordingly, the blossoms appear to be dancing, gracefully swinging their petals. On a larger scale, the fence resembles a stave, which sinks in between the flowers; figuratively, it is they, and then the hills that play the music the artist conceived in the beginning. This painting is a little animated musical and I can almost anticipate one of the flowers to break in in singing, much like the one in the "Little Shop of Horrors." "Feed me, Seymour!!!" Ahem.

I like how the lines shape a circle inside each petal, forming a kind of a heart. It reminds me of biology lessons in high school, where we used to examine onion cells in a microscope, looking for the nucleus. As I already mentioned, the lines bring with them an incredible variety of biological allusions and insinuations. The colors shimmer, value constantly interchanging -- and the lines delimit each intensification or dilution. It is entertaining to see how a yellow segment is being followed by a darker, and eventually by a nearly orange one. I think that this is how the artist reflects the nightly atmosphere, without showing a single star or the moon. Dee creates a somewhat ideal environment in this painting -- somehow, the last thing I notice (in a deliberate way) is that the two farthest hills are actually blue and red. Perhaps this is what "ideal" really means, when odd and unusual things effortlessly seep into one's mind as ordinary and habitual.