At the Museum with Wajiha Hyder

Looking through the Susan Rothenberg exhibition at the Modern Art Museum, her painting ‘the chase’ caught my eye. It was simple, yet curiosity built up in my mind. It was drawn in 1999 and had a mixture of several colors in a swirl. I couldn’t figure out why this was drawn. I learned that it was a picture of dogs killing a rabbit. It depicts several dogs frantically following or desperately escaping each other. It had heavy, dense brush strokes. In ‘The Chase’, the swirl shows frenzied action and almost a state of chaos. Oil paint was used to create this painting, it had a shiny look to it. The colors were strong and mixture of few colors was used. Some colors such as the dogs stood out, the rabbits however were hard to be seen for the background behind the rabbit was the same color. I feel like this was because the rabbit is running out of the picture while the dogs together chasing each other has become the focal point. The main chase moved from chasing a rabbit to the dogs running around each other. Through the use of color, Rothenberg brings out the energy and heat in this chase. We sometimes, in life forget our goals and end up running around in circles. We forget that what we are chasing was never what we wanted in the first place. Some get off this track of life, others continue circling within this cycle. In the painting, there is a white whorl in the middle. Its calm and leads us to see that there is nothing within this cycle in the midst of an almost uptight almost frightening situation. This is mainly where our eyes are drawn and is thus the focal point of the painting. It lets us see everything around that focal point for nothing seems to happening within the circling. The lines are shapes are not apparent, but that is like most paintings drawn by Rotherberg. There is much action and movement and that is shown with the texture. It was both smooth and rough when seen from different angles. I could not decide at first what to say about the texture but I realized it was because of her brush stokes. That was what was giving it the motion in the painting but led me to miss see the actual texture. The artist seems to have created ‘The Chase’ out of a bigger story because everything is led outside of the canvas. There is much imagery in this piece. One thing I read about Rothenberg was that she never liked to finish her paintings and everything she painted was what she saw or had seen. She also in most of her paintings admits to adding part of her own imagination to finish the piece. I feel like she left the middle up to our own interpretation. The dogs are running in this cycle misleading themselves. The one who was being chased, the rabbit, is running away out of it soon to learn that he has escaped the dogs.