Week #24, Grids & Lines II

Dusti Bongé, Untitled (Black Grid), 1965, ink on paper, 36” x 24”.

This week's 1960s Dusti Bongé monochrome grid appears almost identical to the one from last week. Interestingly, although Dusti did not consistently date her work, she did do so in both these cases, thus revealing that last week's work was created in 1960 and this week's work in 1965. This piece is also twice as large as the one from 1960, showing that she explored the grid at various different scales. I have placed them side by side, roughly to scale, below, for comparison.

The fact that Dusti continually played with grid-like arrangements over the course of many years exemplifies how an artist may keep coming back to a particular theme, pattern, or artistic approach.  She explored colored grids painted in acrylic throughout the 1970s, and had occasionally employed a basic grid framework in some of her early works.

As mentioned last week, for some the grid was a way to distill the creative process to its barest essence, to reduce art it to its purest form. To others, its purity and seeming simplicity allowed the artist to take a clear, humble, and automatic approach to creating. This automatism was of course what had also inspired the surrealists, who considered it the most personal, unencumbered way to express oneself.

In both of Dusti’s grids here we get a sense of that automatism. The various horizontal lines and strokes are laid down swiftly, with a self-assurance that is not concerned with perfection. Dusti does not even worry whether her grid aligns with the edges of the paper, which they don’t.  In this grid the vertical lines lean slightly toward the right, in the previous one they leaned toward the left. The entire grid is not centered on the sheet, and again the consistency of the brush strokes varies, perhaps suggesting a very meditative approach to mark making.