Dusti Bongé paint splatter painting
I first saw a horse when looking at this Dusti Bongé paint splatter painting. How about you? I love the energy, spontaneity, and chance of this technique. It’s a technique my all time favorite painter, Earl Biss, used regularly.
Analysis of this artwork comes from Dusti Bongé Art Foundation Executive Director Ligia M. Römer.
Dusti Bongé, Untitled (Surrealist Blue Figure with Orange Splatter), c. 1950, watercolor on paper, 11 ¼” x 8 ½”.
For a brief time during her surrealist period, Dusti Bongé experimented with patterns of paint splatter. She had been using intricate patterns of stippling, lines, swirls, and waves all throughout her various surrealist works, but she did not introduce the splatter technique until the final few years of this period. This was just a few years after Janet Sobel and Jackson Pollock had made their famous “drip” paintings.
Dusti, however, never used the drip/splatter technique in the kind of allover painting method that others did. Instead, she freely dispersed it over and across her various surrealist figures. It would add color and an almost festive quality to her works.
In this work her loose approach to using splatter is evident. Surrounded by an inky black shadow against a pale background is a main figure in blue that dominates the composition. The figure appears to be in motion and its black shadow kind of dissolves into a dark sky with a bright small moon.
From the top left a pattern of colorful stippling diffuses into an orange-red splatter pattern that moves diagonally downward across the work and over the figure. Despite its bright hue, the splatter vaguely resembles rain. But then, in the top right, near the small moon, is yet another one of Dusti’s favorite surrealist elements, namely the little bird in the corner.
As mentioned before, Dusti had several motifs that would recur in her surrealist pieces, such as pianos, ships, angels, and the sea or water. One of these recurring elements was her little bird in flight. These birds would typically hover at the periphery of the main composition and are usually white, thereby occupying a more subtle presence in the overall composition. This bird, although relegated all the way to the top right corner, nonetheless has a dramatic presence given its wonderful polka- dotted plumage.
