Octet In The Key of Red Purple

Paintings (2013)
by Jeffrey Fine

Newton Open Studios
Newton, MA

April 6-7, 2013

Jeffrey Fine, a psychotherapist and painter based in Newton, exhibited his striking new series, Octet in The Key of Red Purple, as part of Newton Open Studios.

According to Fine, the work was inspired, initially, by a gift of a tube of Cadmium Red paint from a friend. Further inspired by Mendelssohn’s great chamber work, his Octet in E Flat, Opus 20, Fine began to paint a canvas every week. Over the course of two months he created a series of eight Octet paintings proper, and a supplemental piece entitled Conductor. Each painting follows improvisationally upon its predecessor, assuming some number of thematic elements from it and elaborating extensively therefrom.

The result is a wonderfully dynamic set – robustly energetic and, in its own way, musically enthralling, capturing in abstract visual form a sense of rhythmic interplay that makes one almost want to dance along with them.

Fine’s style exhibits striking iconic elements, suggesting the sorts of elemental articulations that Miró and Kandinsky helped to establish as contemporary vehicles of visual language. But there is, as well, in Fine’s style a weightiness and boldness that has the features of German expressionists like Marc and Beckmann. The result is a wonderful hybrid of expressions that not only speak, but sing, and do so in rich, baritone voices.

There is also something very down to earth, almost tribal, in the feel of the designs Fine generates. One gets the sense of strikingly elaborate African textiles, or of Navaho rugs improvised upon.

In this swirl of musically inspired color and labyrinthine form emerges what seems like Fine’s own version of a creation myth, recounted in abstract geometrical shapes which gradually evolve into recognizably organic elements.

I had the pleasure of wandering through Fine’s studio and taking some time with each piece in the sequence. Here are some observational tracings, with a few summary reflections.

Octet #1
A checkered pattern on the left grabs one’s attention, calling forth the cadmium arch that reaches across the space. Snake-like, or sperm-like, forms weave around and squiggle through. The sweep of curves echoing from the cadmium arch concatenates into a great rainbow. Cadmium “X”s rear up from the bottom left and travel, in pink, across the cadmium arch, with arrows pointing their trajectory.

Octet #2
A dimensional weave creates the landscape here, allowing vision to penetrate through a cadmium grid over which the snakelike forms now hover. Two pink “X”s, echoing from #1, appear on the lower right. A fish-like form emerges in the middle, with more coherent amphibious elements hovering above the large grid.

Octet #3
A large diagonal band stretches up and to the right, translucently revealing what lies beneath. Is it a beam suggesting observational reflection, cosmic creation, or both? Small checkerboard grids hover above, as signs of infinity appear. The snake-sperms squiggle in the multicolored band, now with gleeful facial expressions. A large beaked face appears on the lower right and a large “X” emerges on the bottom left. The witnessing self arrives, and now marks its spot in this swirl of this symbolically infused protoplasm.

Octet #4
A dominantly blue background upholds a woven twist of bands, highlighted by cadmium. The squiggles of the amphibious forms enter into a prevailing geometry, with hints of rainbow in the swirls, and grids coalesce in uniform blue tiles, rendering regularity and coherent form to the background, suggesting the emergence of a map, and a habitable world.

Octet #5
As though a microscope were put to the arcs of the previous panel, the dense space of the drawn earth reveals, in magnified scope, the rich complexity, the fractal-like details, in the interstices. Squiggled forms of life appear within the dense landscape, as interlaced patterns of representational atoms – stars and X’s – dance with, and around, the squiggles.

Octet #6
The squiggle, in blue, here, has taken over, emerging as a spiral hovering above, giving a kind of focus and perspective on the space beneath, its DNA-like abstraction echoed in one of the bands by a tighter, black version. X’s and infinities, along with small sperm-like elements, appear in this earthly landscape beneath the protective arch of the spiral, its symbolic extension now embracing the landscape of emerging life.

Octet #7
A blue spiral, wound up at the end, now primordially snakelike, unwinds through space, cosmically hovering between mathematical abstraction and the energy of life. A double band of light, echoing and multiplying the single band in #3, stretches down across the space, adding reflective layers to the dimensional vista beneath. Squiggles – like undone infinities, released as life-forms – populate the large twisting end of the blue spiral. A red spiral rises up behind, its passionate cadmium swirl dancing, echoing and resounding with the blue one.

Octet #8
A set of creature-like faces emerge within the rainbow. Enlarged eyes solidify in the faces, echoing with the interiors of infinity sign. X’s morph into plus signs as a large infinity sign rises above. Open mouths show the urge to speak, an incipient, varied and energetic, chorus.

The power of the series as a kind of a creation story emerges forcefully. Out of the miasma of elemental thoughts – squiggles, “X”s, and arcs – develops a kind of rhythmic pulsation, a variation of form and a variegation of color, that begins to render the identification of beings. Gradually, selves take shape, hover, watch, begin to live together.

Fine’s longstanding career as psychotherapist, and as newly expectant grandparent, would seem to inform the sense of this vitally reverberant series. From the raw energy of uncovered memory and imagination, conscious selves gradually take shape and gain, or regain, the capacity to engage vitally in the scene of life. In the womb, the abstraction of cell division varies and morphs, differentiating in wildly complex and subtle formations, until a being emerges into the world, vulnerable and percipient.

Fine has produced here an inventive, symbolically suggestive, and visually enjoyable work that, in its own abstract, but musically evocative, way, tells a very human tale.

– BADMan