WHAT DO YOU SEE?
Looking at “Zutto” (2000) by Michael Goldberg, you see an abstract painting composed of colorful scribbles of green, purple, and orange over layers of pink. The combination of pink and red, analogous colors captivates the viewer's attention. These shades of pink, which edge toward red at the bottom of the canvas, seem to correspond to the array of lines, which you can organize into three horizontal sections, one stacked on top of the other. The top and the middle sections are shaded more with pink while the bottom is a deeper red hue. The longer you look at the painting the more you start to notice the details and features underneath these squiggly lines and layers of pink. Your attention is brought to the bold black lines running horizontally and vertically across the canvas, also in curvy, irregular patterns. The thick red and black lines and the red and pink shading seem to be created with a different medium than the thin colorful lines seen underneath. Upon our first encounter with “Zutto”, we want to search for order or a pattern.
How is what you see arranged?
Michael Goldberg, Zutto, 2000, oil and oil stick on canvas
The focal point of the painting is the pink, as it takes up the majority of the canvas and creates a brightness that contrasts against the darker and more bold colors splashed across the painting. The pink, undefined blocks in the center of the canvas are translucent, allowing the viewer to see different colors and lines underneath. The blurred pink rectangles are intersected by thick black and red lines. But all the red is focused towards the bottom of the canvas. The red also seems to form a rectangle but is more opaque, blocking out the majority of the color underneath it. “Zutto” plays with light through these translucent and opaque blocks of color. |
Near the bottom corners there is an absence of pink or red, revealing what seems to be the original colors. Although they are not used in abundance like the pink and red, there are secondary colors under what may have been the second layer of paint. Across the page is a single yellow line that runs from corner to corner. This line also appears to be underneath the pink and red. There are thin black lines that loop around the canvas without care and strict and jagged lines determined to go in one direction. At the top of the canvas there is an almost free space that is occupied with the thin black lines. This sliver of space has almost no color, with the exception of a pronounced brown stroke.
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What does this structure point to?
❝To me, the concept of abstract painting is still the primary visual challenge of our time❞ |
All of the overlapping lines in this painting are busy and scattered, having a child-like appearance. It almost looks like it was done with crayons, but this is due to the use of oil and oil sticks. The painting is not symmetrical, and it does not have an overwhelmingly rough texture. Lines and rectangular grid shapes are used throughout the entire canvas. The variety of the thin and thick lines give the painting a sense of movement, as though the lines are moving through the regions of color in their own way, either freely or strictly.
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What does "Zutto" mean?
This sense of layers gives the viewer the idea that this piece may have been painted over an extensive period of time, that the painting was carefully crafted down to the smallest detail, or that the artist took a different route from what he planned and began to throw additional lines and colors into the painting. In Japanese, the title “Zutto” refers to something that took place a long time ago or has been in progress for a prolonged period. This adds to our association of this painting to time and layers even more. This painting is composed of layers on a two-dimensional plane and does not have any three-dimensional aspects.
MIchael goldberg❝One of the reasons I sit with a work for a long time is to give myself a chance to recognize my own visual lies.❞ |
Does "Zutto" have a message?
Michael Goldberg was an artist best known for abstract expressionism, and was known to use oil sticks directly on the canvas creating patches of color like the ones seen in “Zutto.” In Bomb Magazine, Goldberg says that when he "sits with a painting for a long time one of the reasons is to give himself the chance to recognize his own visual lies", and he uses "a sort of grid system to convince himself that there is an underlying structure." “Zutto'' shows exactly that. We can see the process of this painting, how it was created step by step over an extensive period of time. More than an expression of feeling or an abstract representation of the world then, “Zutto" is a record of its own making, the product of an artist playing with color, patterns, and lines simply as time passes.
A multimodal project by Keidy Rodriguez for Dr. Sturm's ENGL 1102 course Georgia State University, Spring 2022
Works Cited
Ostrow, Saul. “Michael Goldberg by Saul Ostrow - Bomb Magazine.” BOMB Magazine, April 01, 2001,
bombmagazine.org/articles/michael-goldberg/.
Ostrow, Saul. “Michael Goldberg by Saul Ostrow - Bomb Magazine.” BOMB Magazine, April 01, 2001,
bombmagazine.org/articles/michael-goldberg/.
