Lovesong #3 Three qualities of hand-painted imagery inter-weave throughout this film: (1) a mash of thick lines delineating colored shapes, (2) thin black lines, like drawings, which most suggest recognizable body-parts, and (3) globs of pure color at interplay with each other. An irregularity of rhythm (produced by repetition of frames 2,3,and 4 times) creates the sense of a driving force propelling the inter-weave of these essentially abstract displays: three-fourths of the way through the rhythmic intensity falters, “brakes down” as it were, almost becomes a mockery of its earlier sexual regularity. Instead of a variety midst regular beat, the forms suggest some loose variance. Two formal factors seem to “save the day,” as it were: 1) an increase of beseeming textures, and 2) interruptive white flashes; and these create a meaningful (rhythmically and tonally coherent) ending. Lovesong #4 A natural companion piece to “Lovesong #3,” this (also hand-painted) work counterbalances the rhythmic irregularities and, one might say, temporal despairs with steadiness of beat, creating an absolute progression of formal feeling and meaning. The sense of line drawings, and consequent pictorial representation, has given way to shapes-in-space composed of only four colors: Lavender, Purple, Green and Turquoise. Their dance with the darkness suggests an inter-action of bodies. At the end there’s a flare to a field of white within which a very tiny shape (almost like lips) pulses and finally flickers out.

In the spirit of the Roman, Arabic, Egyptian and Babylonian Series, these hand-painted films attempt to imagine the kind of Persian visual thinking which created their calligraphy, miniatures and aesthetic designs in general. This is a collection of singly- and doubly-printed (two frames for each one) hand-painted work in six parts: 1) Singly-printed multi-colored watery “blobs” and “feathery” streaks of painted color, dominated by yellows and reds interweaving in complexity until there’s an evolution of hard-edge autumn leaf patterns which dissipate into patterns similar to the beginning of the film. 2) This begins in a deep brilliant red which darkens into deeper reds and lavender shapes, disrupted by a variety of colors settling into browns and grays and shapes most rock-like, all of which is then shot-thru with sufficiently yellow to break up all hard-edge form and give a molten aspect to the mixtures of shapes. This is double-printed. 3) Doubly printed striations of “brush-strokes” through multicolored “rock” forms dissolving then to blackened ‘mud’ eliciting increasing sense of being under earth. 4) Singly-printed criss-crosses of molten “brush” – (hard edge) strokes of black over pebbled yellow, ending finally on an inter-mix of all intertwined forms with increasing lightness/whiteness. 5) Double-printed thinnest possible lines and multiple dots of pale color interwoven with sweeps of linear tones in swiftly transversing motion, all deepening from this almost white field of flitting activity to some solidification of forms. 6) Singly-printed evolution from a deep blue-blackness of hard-edge twisting and sweeping bars and deep black swirls of dry-cracked and electrically “webbed” blotches, giving way to mixtures of bright blue and deep black sweeps of almost hieroglyphic forms midst swirls of multiple colors played against fleeting blacks evolving into multiple shapes in contrastingly brilliant whites. (Stan Brakhage)