Plastic Paint 1952

Brett Weston made this gelatin silver print, known as ‘Plastic Paint,’ sometime in the 20th century. Looking at this surface of bursting rays, I can imagine Weston in the darkroom, coaxing these stark contrasts from the chemistry of the developing print. The way the light flares out from the center and splinters out into fine, almost prickly tendrils makes me think of the way Agnes Martin drew those delicate lines on canvas, full of trembling precision. You can almost feel the air crackling with static. The stark contrast between the dark and light areas creates a dizzying, almost hallucinatory effect, as if the image is pulsating before your eyes. The dark voids scattered throughout the composition add to the mystery, like missing pieces of a puzzle that only add to its enigmatic charm. Weston invites us to see the world anew, transforming the mundane into the sublime. And isn’t that what all artists strive to do, to find beauty in the unexpected, and to share that vision with the rest of us?