Derek Cracco
Region: South
In a nod to the French postimpressionist painter Georges Seurat,
who devised a painting method in which imagery emerged from
thousands of colored dots, I have created a series of intimate,
detailed, pointillist-style paintings in which I rely on repetition
and attention to detail to make fields of flashes, stars, and light.
My influences range from astronomy to particle physics; my
paintings shift and oscillate between the macro and the micro,
between the illusion of light and the visual disruption the images
produce when viewed at close range. These works embody a
nuanced understanding of color theory. In a lineage descended
from Victor Vasarely, I combine subtleties of color with both optics
and illusion to create retinal images that work on multiple levels.
The use of a field of single dots allows me to get to the aspects of
the works that I find most interesting: color and light.