A spaceman and a correction about a Frenchman

This spaceman was no Yuri Gagarin or John Glenn or the guy who famously told Houston that they had a problem.  No this was the art teacher from Buenos Aires, Argentina, called Fontana, who was fascinated by space in pictures so much that eventually, he gave up on paint and looked just at the space instead.

Every time I visit this piece of art in the Tate Modern in London, I could quite easily stand in front of it for an hour or so.  What fascinates me, even after several viewings is the perfection of this image.  It consists of just one pre-considered slash at the stretched canvas, just one stroke only.  That is as minimalist as you can get!  But the perfection I mentioned above.  I have looked at this image for probably two hours in total (on one occasion when I was in a hurry, it was the only artwork I had time to see!), and I can not imagine that slash to be any other length, any other curvature or at any other point on the canvas.  It is quite simply perfect.  Space needs an object as much as an object needs space in an image.  The object here is obviously the cut in the canvas.  But for me, this is the uncanny thing.  The spaces are by no means the same shape or area or anything, they do not rest on thirds, yet they are perfectly balanced by the cut.

I find the whole work of art mesmerising.  Maybe I like minimalism or maybe I'm a Fontana freak, but it's got the "Wow" factor in spades! 

It's got a nice frame as well!

Now a correction of my last post.  The famous picture to which I alluded was "The Decisive Moment" snapped just outside the Gare St Lazare in Paris in the 1930s by Henri Cartier-Bresson who later wrote a book about how there is a decisive moment when the shutter moves which gives the perfect picture.  You can see his photograph on Google Images.  My poor imitation is therefore "The Ill-Defined Moment"

But back to Cockatoo Island where we left our galvo shed with the down pipe, swirled around in blue and pink.  The problem with swirling, or to be technical, using a polar co-ordinate filter, is that there is always a join mark that has to be disguised.  I thought about it a bit, and realised that my grey coloured pic of the shed would have to go over it.  This posed a problem of space, and so I got round this by making the swirl one quarter of a flag.  So as I needed four quarters I did a black and white version; a solarised version; solarised with a swirl; and solarised with a ripple, which makes it look very indigenous.  Then I put the original photo on the top.  It looked ghastly, with all the angles being right angles.  But when I put the original pic at an angle, the whole composition was transformed.

The thing is, do I put it in one of our Open competitions, or do I have the patience to wait a few months and put it in our Special Effects comp?

Well, I like it, even if nobody else does!