The Aleph Hunt
David Piper
Acrylic on canvas
2012
The Aleph Hunt is a compositional exercise based on The Hippo Hunt by Rubens. Rubens is the master of complex compositions and so I wanted to do a study on his arrangement of volumes and started with just a basic outline sketch of The Hippo Hunt.
I began to reduce the number of lines and shapes to a more basic sense of volume for each of the subjects.
Several years ago I was fascinated by Picasso's painting of a Woman in a Red Chair. I have done several paintings that have used this sense of shape and volume by deconstructing form. It's quite fun, because you are never sure what the end result may be when you start... and so I applied this technique using paint to come up with the Aleph Hunt. As I was painting it, the middle shape began to look like a Klien Bottle and because of its amorphous shapes, I began thinking about the convergence of all of these shapes to make this picture. The universal human condition is one of searching for meaning and attaching to our sense of what is an origin. I have loved JL Borges story of the Aleph and during the couple of hours of this exercise these influences began to steep; into the story of the Aleph Hunt. I am sending them to a former classmate as a gift because I think she will find great benefit in seeing the process and am excited to think she will have a more intimate appreciation for the artist's experience and process that will lead her to grow in her relationship with Art and its many facets of history and theory.
Picasso's "Woman In a Red Chair"
