Painted Figures, Places and Color Fields
This room is painted. The marks are soft, broad and blended, and the line, when it appears, sits on top of color instead of making it. Twenty-four works from the first six months of the collection, December 2021 to June 2022, hang here because they share that surface.
What is painted changes from week to week. A dancer and a duck in a room, a sunset over water, a sky of pale cloud, a house in a field, a figure in a yellow raincoat, a woman wrapped in cloth, a rooster, an elephant, a mouse. Between them come color fields with no subject at all: drips, stripes, a plaid of black and red.
In most of the collection the ground is flat color. Here it is air, cloud, light and weather, and the figures stand in it, not on it.
Faces in the Light
Four works from the first three weeks. Faces float in soft light, a dancer and a duck share a room, and the first color field and the first landscape arrive.
NNOTB #3
Faces float in pink and gold light, drawn as thin blue and yellow outlines over a ground of soft overlapping discs. Six of them hang at the left and the top like balloons, each with two round eyes and a mouth, and a profile with spiky hair stands in the middle looking right. The whole picture glows, and nothing in it is solid. It was made on December 8, 2021, the same day as the first two works in the collection, and it is the first painted one.
NNOTB #9
A dancer in a short gold dress raises her arms and shouts, and beside her a duck in a feathered coat stands with its wings folded, under a hooked lamp. Both are painted in gold and brown with scribble over them, and the room behind them is a weave of pink, lilac and gold lines. The dancer's face is red with a wide open mouth; the duck's eyes are narrow and its beak is shut. It is the most peopled painting in the room, with 562 recorded strokes.
NNOTB #11
No figure at all: vertical drips of orange, red, blue, white and brown run down the square, crossed by a few white and red lines.
NNOTB #15
A sunset over water. Pale cloud at the top, a band of orange and gold at the horizon, and below it a winding channel of blue water between dark purple and green banks, painted in soft overlapping strokes with scribble on top. It is the first landscape in the collection, made on Christmas Eve 2021, and the most densely drawn work in the room.
Winter: Sky, House, Fields
January and February 2022. A cloudy sky, a house in a field, and three color fields in a row, then a figure in a raincoat.
NNOTB #20
A sky of pale cloud, painted in cream, blue and pink discs with yellow light coming through the middle and thin blue and red lines drawn over the clouds.
NNOTB #21
A house with a pitched roof drawn in brown and lime green line, standing in a field of olive and blue strokes under a sky of blue bars.
NNOTB #34
On cream: a red block, a white block, a grey ring with a black center, a blue box hanging from a line, a magenta block, and three small green flowers on stems.
NNOTB #36
Vertical strokes of blue, yellow, orange, red and teal on pale blue, crossed by five thin white lines.
NNOTB #37
A plaid of black, red, orange and yellow strokes on white, crossed by a few green and grey lines.
NNOTB #38
A figure in a yellow raincoat with the hood up stands against dark green, its face in shadow under the hood except for a red mouth of pointed teeth and two red marks for eyes. The coat is painted in broad yellow strokes with white lines for the seams. One sleeve ends in a hand drawn in white and red. The figure fills the right half of the square and faces left into the dark.
Spring Creatures
March and April. A creature in a field of light, trees in a haze, a gown, a wrapped woman, a rooster and an elephant.
NNOTB #40
A black creature with a striped head and a white grin crouches in a field of gold and purple discs, its spotted tail curling up behind it and a hand reaching out.
NNOTB #44
Trees in a haze of pale discs, drawn in thin blue, green and white line, a tall trunk at the center and grass at the bottom in loops.
NNOTB #48
A figure in a huge brown gown turns away on olive, its arms a flurry of orange and black strokes, a spray of colored dots rising from it like confetti.
NNOTB #50
A woman with black hair in a bun and a small pale face stands wrapped in cloth: blue and pink bands wound across her chest, and a long striped robe of gold, brown and purple falling to the bottom edge. The ground is dark olive and flat. Her mouth is a small red mark and her eyes are two short lines. It is the stillest work in the room, and the only one that looks like a dressed person seen from the front.
NNOTB #56
A rooster painted in red, purple and blue feathers stands on blue, its yellow beak open, a white belly and a raised crest of spikes.
NNOTB #59
An elephant with a curled trunk and small round eyes sits on yellow, its hide painted in grey and purple with scribble over it, flames rising from its head and tail.
May and June
The last nine works, May 4 to June 4. An angel in the clouds, an astronaut, a mouse, a figure in a hat, a gold armored body, and a barn full of figures.
NNOTB #65
A creature with a halo kneels in a bank of clouds under a gold sun, its head bowed and its hands raised, painted in brown and gold with white light on the edges.
NNOTB #104
An astronaut's head inside a round helmet, against black space full of white stars. The face is painted in soft gold and grey discs, with two mismatched eyes, a long nose and a grimace of teeth drawn in orange line. The helmet is a white ring with grey reflections. The face is the most anxious in the room: one eye wide, the other narrowed, the mouth pulled down at the corners.
NNOTB #111
A mouse with round ears, black button eyes and whiskers hugs its own pink arms on a yellow ground inside a black frame, painted in gold, orange and pink.
NNOTB #115
A figure in a wide-brimmed hat with flowers on it, seen from the side, its face a blur of pale grey and pink discs against white and blue haze.
NNOTB #127
Orange with black blocks, blue and white diagonal stripes, green bars and scattered dots, in a tan frame.
NNOTB #131
A gold armored body with two round yellow eyes and a grin of white teeth stands in a frame, its plates drawn in short strokes of gold, blue and white over black.
NNOTB #137
A figure with a mass of dark red hair over its face holds a hand to its head, in a yellow shirt on a ground of yellow bars, the face hidden entirely.
Compare with #115, in this room
NNOTB #139
Figures hang and climb in the rafters of a barn, painted in brown and gold over a ground of tall vertical strokes. One with a long face hangs from a beam at the right, two more sit on a shelf at the upper right, and a grinning head looks out from the lower corner. The whole picture is made of uprights, beams, legs and falling strokes. It is the last work of New Nifty on the Block's first part, made June 4, 2022.
Closing
The first painting has faces floating in pink light, and nothing in it has an edge. The last has figures hanging in a barn made of boards. The soft ground is still there in both. What changed is that the figures found something to hold on to.