"Field Mouse I" 1970’s Color Lithograph on Wove Paper by Robert Natkin

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Natkin’s Field Mouse series, which first emerged in 1968, marked a sharp departure from the highly architectural Apollo canvases. His … Read more Natkin’s Field Mouse series, which first emerged in 1968, marked a sharp departure from the highly architectural Apollo canvases. His less formal, more improvisational Field Mouse works teem with what Natkin has called a “scatter balance” of interacting textures, patterns, and shapes. Densely enmeshed yet fluid, these spot, crosshatches, snakes, and scumblings bring to mind the whispering sounds and colors–metaphors for the words of the poet–described by Baudelaire in the nineteenth-century sonnet “Correspondances”. In the world of Natkin’s Field Mouse canvases, as in the mystical world of the artist described by Baudelaire, colors, light, and inexplicably ambiguous forms commingle and whisper among themselves.

The Field Mouse paintings, unlike Natkin’s serenely cool, more static straight edge and Step paintings, overflow with life and movement. The artist has often cited Paul Klee as perhaps the greatest inspiration for his early Field Mouse paintings.

Nearly all of Natkin’s Field Mouse paintings contain some sort of dot formation. These dots are sometimes carefully crafted and boldly colored, so that, like Klee’s letters, they seem to perch defiantly at the surface of the canvas. In some works, clusters of dots overflow, like trapped bubbles, between other squiggles of fields of pigment. Most often, these dots are irregularly painted flecks and dashes, elusively scattered, muted, seemingly evaporating into the depths of the painting.

His Field Mouse paintings are indeed emotional landscapes in which the trees, sky and rolling hills of traditional landscapes are replaced by interacting pattern and shapes cradled against or boldly emerging from veils of texture. See less