The Contemporaries by Roger White

Author:Roger White
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620400951
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

Frank on a Rock, 2002

He’s reclining on a rock jutting out of the water; let’s take the cue from the painting’s title and call him Frank. The bottom edge of the canvas cuts him off at the knees, and the horizon line has been pushed all the way to the top. The rock is white, the water is blue, the sky is a flinty gray, and Frank is very, very orange.

Frank’s is the orange of deep, thermonuclear sunburn, the orange of the lifelong tanner in extremis. It exceeds the level of orange you can produce with an opaque application of oil paint—even the most expensive, high-pigment-count, straight-out-of-the-tube orange. To achieve this color, Schutz laid down a thick coat of red within the contour of Frank’s body and then scraped it off with the edge of a palette knife or a rubber squeegee, revealing a layer of transparent yellow underneath that vibrates with the residual red deposited in the weave of the canvas. Quick pink and red daubs suggest the volume of Frank’s arms, legs, chest, dick. He is bracing himself on two palms, resplendent in the sun, inviting the viewer to drink him in.

Sadly, Frank is no looker. He has prehensile lips, a sparse beard, and stringy blond hair pasted over the dome of his head. His small, wide-set eyes poke out turtlishly from beneath a prominent brow. Not if he were the last man on Earth, you might think, which is exactly who he is.

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