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"Ship Shape I" by J. Collins Baker
Ref: 3275
This small compact oil on canvas in broad white painted wooden frame by J Collins Baker would sit well in Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, or in some Corbusier styled beach side house in Cornwall or in any modern house by the sea.
It is classic Modernist, seeming "pure" abstract at first you realise it is in fact a view of a boat, yacht or sailing vessel. The ordinary is seen afresh in this case from an ariel view - but it's more than that - what the artist is seeking is a distillation, a new definition, so the work is reduced down, compact, symmetrical, revisioned into something like an ideogram or sacred hieroglyph.
The Modernists believed that in modern experience and often in modern engineering once could find new forms of the Classic to equal the benchmarks of the past. Here the homage or glyph, one of a series it seems, is based on the sailing vision and on the actual form ("shape") of the boat in full sail. But "ship shape" also means cleaned up, scrubbed back, re-inforcing the idea that this is a new definition of the maritime unalloyed or polluted by the clichés and conventions of past art.
English c.1950s
H: 50cm (19.7in)
W: 32cm (12.6in)
D: 2cm (0.8in)
SOLD
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