Forms, Styles and Types of Art

For this blog post I chose an artwork named “Roll and Roll” by Song Myung Jin. The painting belongs to Korean Art Museum Association and Song created it in 2006. This landscape painting shows relationship between a flat, 2D canvas and a 3D illusion that grass rolls are creating. “Roll an Roll” may seem simply but actually the painting is rich in demonstrating many visual elements. Song uses natural forms,like in this case grass. The great portion of a painting is grass that makes us feel like we are observing a real grass. This characteristic makes the art work residential and abstract because Song plays with color and shape to give us a sense of “real”. Song successfully made a monotone grass flatness look two and three dimensional by adding pink and white color on the two rolls. We observe surfaces that seem to be turned over toward the backside on the entirely green canvas and surfaces that seem to be turned under the green canvas but yet the painting is identifying as flat area. In addition, the green canvas seems to have a texture rather than flat surface. As we learned more in class about shape of space I came to conclusion that the grass, as main objects, represents a positive space and since the white surface brings vision of emptiness symbolize negative space. I read that Song found inspiration for “Roll and Roll” in people’s way of growing grass. People place rolls of grass on the ground and roll them out. Once the grass is rolled out, it is able to root and continues to grow. Also the art work does not consist of any geometrical shape but organic shapes are recognizable. In order to attracts as many eyes as possible Song also uses pink and green color which are opposite on the color wheel. These complimentary colors give happier and brighter look to the painting.