The Blue Whale 1973

Curator: Ronnie Landfield's "The Blue Whale" from 1973. He primarily worked with acrylic and pastel in this abstract-expressionist drawing. Editor: Initially, it strikes me as restless, despite the deep blue background. The stark, thin lines almost vibrate against that darkness. I’m intrigued by this dynamism achieved with such seemingly simple materials. Curator: It is dynamic. Notice how the enclosed shape implies a whale but dissolves at the edges. The suggestion, the symbol, becomes more powerful than a realistic depiction. Whales themselves, ancient and mysterious creatures, often represent a deep connection to the subconscious, to hidden knowledge. Editor: That boundary, delineated by the gold-ish line, looks both definite and provisional simultaneously, hinting at the contained subject as much as a sense of the material boundaries of this…paper or canvas? Do we know? I imagine it’s something rather coarse to have taken the acrylic pastel. Curator: It does hint at something barely contained. You can see elements of abstract expressionism echoed here. A sense of interiority expressed as expansiveness, like the unbounded sea suggested behind the abstracted whale form. Editor: Right, that sense of endlessness within a finite, manually defined area. I'm thinking about the tension of production here – the physical labor that made each individual chalk or pastel stroke, and then the choice of each hue laid down on this surface. Curator: Those color choices – the pale blues, reds, and stark white. I wonder about their symbolism, too. White is commonly associated with purity and spiritual connection; could it be that the whale represents something sacred? Editor: I keep circling back to those thin strokes. They’re clearly deliberate, but not overly polished, really focusing your gaze on process itself, a layering that allows the ground to be seen but builds an entire scene. Curator: Yes, this tension. Perhaps the incompleteness is intentional. The work implies a continuous process. Landfield provides visual language that invites us to imagine what the whale is, or what it might become. Editor: What it is and how it became so. It’s a drawing built from almost fugitive marks that add up to more than the sum of its parts. Fascinating piece, very gestural, yet very considered.