Week #44, Rhythmic Lines I

Untitled (Black Lines), c. 1975, ink on paper, 12” x 9”.

Starting in the 1960 and into the 1970s, Dusti Bongé’s gestural, abstract expressionist style of painting started to evolve. She started experimenting with rhythmic patterns of lines, grids, rectangles, and even circles and spirals. We will look at some of her works exclusively featuring lines. 

Dusti was not alone in this pursuit. There were several female artists who were pivoting away from the male dominated abstract expressionist movement to other ways of exploring abstraction. Most of these artists focused on the grid, the sometimes visible, sometimes invisible, underlying, organizational structure for so much in our physical and representational world. But what they sought through using grids was not so much organizing their composition but rather adopting it as a neutral ground which could be subjected to different manipulations.

However, we are going to focus on Dusti's more minimalist and rather singular way of creating rhythmic compositions with just lines. In the above work, it seems that the intent in carefully laying down each line was not so much about the end result, but more so about the physical mark making. And this mark making was decidedly different from the aggressive gestures of Dusti’s abstract expressionist era. This work exudes a calm, meditative, and repetitive process, and rather than conveying pure emotion, it focusses on the way a simple hand gesture creates a physical trail or impression.

The resulting composition shows that strict adherence to a perfect pattern is not the aim. With the density of the vertical lines varying, they come so close together in some spots that they almost become one. Additionally, the solidity and thickness of each individual mark also vary along its length. And finally, although the ends of the lines match at the top, they are all slightly longer or shorter than the next, thereby creating a rhythmic yet uneven edge along the bottom.

And what can I say about the two black dots... They somehow emphasize the steady cadence of the piece.