Over the years, I’ve had various tag lines for my artwork. They were kind of like corporate names, if you can envision a company that is involved with absolutely nothing but making art or writing poetry or just generally sending out a riotous yet winsome identity that serves no purpose except my own.
Early on, circa mid-to-late seventies, it was Other World Artwork, a bit of a twist on the “Third World-First World” dichotomy that was much on our minds at the time. Then came Space Monkey/French Kiss Productions, in honor of the Patti Smith song, Ms. Smith in her awesome entirety, and a general celebration of the wholesomely erotic, followed by a brief appearance from the Fabulous Underachievers Club, of which I am the founder and president, although we haven’t had a meeting in ages.
Sometime during the 1990s, I switched to SOTVC—Sign of the Vibrating Colors—which pretty much sums up an everlasting thrill of mine: placing (or finding) colors next to each other that set off visual harmonics in a very radical way. Since the aughts, sad to say, there have been no such tags. But I do still seek out the vibrations.
Favored duets include blue alongside orange, turquoise next to pink, and purple, or perhaps more accurately, violet, against green. In any case, I always thought the purple-green scenario reflected complementary colors. Not really so, though I did find a “red-purple” directly across from a “yellow-green” in a color wheel that featured tertiary colors. Or are they hues?
Setting the lexicon aside, here’s a meditation on violet and green, in fairly subtle permutations and ranging as far as they want to from the scheme—which is exactly right as far as I’m concerned. Love, Cat
01 Serpentine Fire, 02 Impossible Landscape, 03 Yellow-Green Shards,
04 Violets Are Me, 05 Remnant Crop, 06 The Fist of Resistance,
07 Sonar Fantasia, 08 Just the Shadow, 09 Who Could Say,
10 December in February, 11 Yellow-Green Crosses Violet,
12 Cellophane, 13 Primordial Lick, 14 Exquisite Reassemblage
Images and words by Catherine Rutgers © 2015
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