Week #19, Thinking in Color: Blue II
- Ligia M. Römer
- May 12
- 2 min read
This week’s blue work by Dusti Bongé offers a nice contrast of blues, underscoring the rich range of this hue as it exists all around us. Although initially this work was cataloged as untitled (with a parenthetical title), upon some consideration, we determined that it was in fact created as a study for a later larger Window Painting titled Rose Island Reef (see below), and hence it is now titled Study for Rose Island Reef.
In the 1970s when Dusti traveled to the Bahamas with her son and grandson on her son’s sailboat, they visited Rose Island, a small sliver of an island surrounded by reefs, and apparently inhabited by friendly pigs (no, really). Of course, Dusti was inspired by the natural beauty of the place such as the crystal-clear water and the rich marine life of the reefs This was a completely different visual seascape than the one she was so familiar with on the Gulf Coast.
The reefs, which are close to the islands in the shallower turquoise waters, appear like underwater dark shadows against the white sand surrounding them. Sunlight, refracted through the water and reflected on the rugged, highly irregular surface of the reef, creates a random pattern of little bright points in these dark shadows. This pattern, in turn, is constantly shifting with each wave washing over it. As such one gets a dynamic, constantly changing, magical interplay of dark and light, each moment looking slightly different.
Dusti masterfully captures the essence of this phenomenon in this small abstract study. Executed in tempera, which is much denser and opaque than watercolor, she nonetheless captures the glimmering points of light against the deep blue shadow. Although the main dark form is floating in a sea of turquoise green, it is anchored by the two narrow wedge-shaped slivers of shadow on either side, one brown and one blue. These do not reflect any light.
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