The visit to the Chelsea Galleries was a nice change from visiting museums. However, one thing I did not like about the galleries is that there were no titles or descriptions for the paintings. Sometimes, it is helpful to have the title of a painting because it can give the viewer a different perspective from which to view the painting. However, overall I liked the fact that each gallery focused on a specific type of painting and that we got to see a lot of different painting styles.
The first and second galleries had interesting art, but I could not get any meaning from the paintings. The paintings in the first gallery made me feel scared. A lot of them had scribbles with what looked like a black crayon or colored pencil. These scribbles created a hectic, even crazy, atmosphere. Also, I couldn’t understand what was happening in the paintings. They looked like they contained shapes which resembled human figures or other objects, but I could not tell exactly what the shapes were. This made me feel uncomfortable because I felt like as hard as I tried I would never figure out what I was looking at. It was like looking at someone’s nightmares. I felt like the artist took whatever he saw in his dreams and then painted these images. However, like most dreams, it seemed that these paintings would only make sense while you’re in the dream. The second gallery, contained paintings with squigly lines. I thought the color pallets of the paintings were interesting and I wondered how the artist chose which colors to use in each painting. The colors worked well together and complemented each other. I also thought it was interesting that the artist decided to leave panels on the sides of the paintings. In addition, even though there were lines going everywhere, the lines looked controlled. They werent concentrated too much in one part of the painting. I liked how these painting were balanced and how the artist was able to maintain control of lines even though they are going in a lot of different directions and looping around each other.
The fifth and sixth galleries were extremely different from each other. The sexual images and the bright colors in the fifth gallery created a humorous light hearted atmosphere. I thought these paintings were interesting because of the designs in the backgrounds and the colors that the artist used. In contrast to the fifth gallerie’s light hearted atmosphere, the sixth gallery had a strong political message. I liked how the artist in the sixth gallery used lines to represent the cultural dislocations in Iran. One picture that caught my attention was the men walking. There is a line dividing the men in the middle and they are wearing different clothes on the top and bottom. I thought this picture clearly showed the many different groups of people present in Iran. I thought it was interesting how the artist was capable of using this one technique: lines and divisions, to convey a political message effectively.
