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Looking for the Metaphor
A visitor commented about this painting, "It has the feel of the Southwest." This was very astute, since Pat Steir's mountain paintings of the early 1970s were inspired by her visits to Agnes Martin in New Mexico. Both women are painters and poets, and both have studied nature and art long enough to abstract their common essence. Looking for the Mountain is a metaphor that works on many levels—linguistic, aesthetic, and philosophical.
This small section functions like a traditional picture of a mountain at night under a dark sky. More likely, though, Steir was isolating for us two perceptual tools that help us recognize aspects of our world: color and silhouette. It's our remarkable ability to synthesize that allows us to turn such minimal hints into a picture.
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 Part 1 Discussion: Looking for the Mountain (328K) Get QuickTime |
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