Umber Black 1974

Yun Hyong-keun made *Umber Black* with oil on canvas, and the painting has these huge, soft, almost smudged vertical bands of black. I really feel for this artist. I mean, think about making something this dark, this solemn, but somehow keeping it open. He's probably thinking about Rothko, you know, those fields of color, but he’s doing something different, something more...I don't know... earthbound? The paint isn't thick, but it’s not exactly thin either. More like stained in, seeping into the canvas. There’s this one hazy edge that looks like he swiped his hand across it, maybe trying to soften the line. You get the sense of him, in the studio, wrestling with the darkness, searching for some kind of light within it. It’s a brave thing to do, to go that deep. It's an ongoing conversation, artists trying to figure out how to make something mean something, or maybe, how to let something just be.