Related WorksNo related works found.
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| Work
String Theory
Date: | 2007
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Medium: | Oil on canvas, metal clasp, 2 pins, yarn |
Size inches: | 58 x 45 |
Size cm: | 147.3 x 114.3
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Signature: | Signed and dated lower right |
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Location: | New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut |
New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut. Gift of Walter and Linda Wick, 2014. Accession Number 2014.24
| Image Notes
Reference
Vermeer, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, c. 1662-64, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Looking at a painting by Vermeer George Deem would point out to me the hole in the canvas where Vermeer had inserted a pin for the attached string which was used as a perspective guide. The painting completed, Vermeer removed the pin and the perspective string.
George used that same time-tested method but he preferred wool yarn to string.
When he completed his painting String Theory, George removed the pin and yarn, then replaced it, removed it, replaced it, concluding at last to leave the pin in place with the perspective string of yarn attached.
On the right hand side of the painting there is a second pin in the stretcher to which the yarn is looped.
To allow for that, the painting went unframed, a decision that in any case George had already arrived at so as not to compromise such things as his conflation of the black picture frame in String Theory with the frame of a doorway.
The title is layered too. Nancy Liedtke is the wife of Walter Liedtke, the curator of Dutch painting at the Metropolitan. In January 2008, she and Walter came to see the newly completed painting in the studio. Walter grew silent as Nancy, who is a mathematician, and George had an animated discussion about the painting. Nancy talked about the mathematical spaces described in String theory in addition to the familiar three dimensions plus time.
Vermeer’s painting The Woman in Blue has quite another frame at the Rijksmuseum. George’s Painting With Frame, 2008,shows The Woman in Blue as it is seen on the wall of the Rijksmuseum. You can see why Painting With Frame too went unframed.(Ronald Vance, email to George Freedman, June 9, 2010)
| Artist's Notes
Full of expectations
Nothing is there yet.
with a feeling of pressing outward
everything comes forward swelling towards
the observer.
George Deem
undated note on String Theory in progress
| Exhibitions
Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York
Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, Connecticut
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