Ross Bleckner

I first heard about Ross Bleckner through Lia's lectures and was instantly captivated by the high contrast in his bold work. I loved the repetition and the way he's still able to create a focus and allow the viewer's gaze to slowly work around the paintings. I decided I wanted to do some research on his work because I wanted to understand his concepts and why he was so interested in repetition and how he was able to create so much life in each individual stroke or subject but when looked at as a whole you just see the repeated pattern.
Bleckner is a New York based artist and in the 1980s was heavily into optical art but later in the 1990s he slowly shifted his subject matter and started painting magnified cellular structures of autoimmune diseases. These works are what really started interesting me since I love painting cellular structures as well as veins and brains. He even had an exhibition called "Birds, Brains, and Flower." which was a truly captivating collection of work.
Most of these works about cells pertain to his homosexual journey and they big boom of AIDS. So he painted the virus as well as cancer cells to investigate what is really going on under the surface/skin. He believes that once something is done on the outside it must be investigated on the inside just like the skin on your body or the paint on a canvas. An X-ray is needed to see what if everything is working internally. He doesn't want his paintings to just be pretty and decorative but rather have something more purposeful within the painting.
But what I really enjoyed reading about were his "flower paintings". And I put quotations around them because he does not actually consider them to be flower paintings but rather the trace of a flower. In his process, he spends a lot of time rendering flowers and painting them with great detail and then once he is finished he scrapes them all off with a palette knife. Because a flower's life is so short lived. It blooms majestically and then withers away. These series of paintings became a study for Bleckner to see what something looks like after the subject is removed. And after the subject is removed does that image still read and resemble as a flower or a trace?