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Elliptical Ground
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Elliptical Ground
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5
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ELLIPTICAL GROUND
by
Erica Yenning Huang
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS
(Studio)
August 1997
©1997 Erica Yenning Huang
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UMI Number: 1387821
C o p y rig h t 1997 b y
H uang, E r i c a Y en n in g
All rights reserved.
UMI Microform 1387821
Copyright 1998, by UMI Company. All rights reserved.
This microform edition is protected against unauthorized
copying under Title 17, United States Code.
UMI
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UNIVERSITY O F SO U T H E R N C A L IFO R N IA
T H E GRADUATE S C H O O L
U N IV ER SITY P A R K
LO S A N Q C L E S . C A L IF O R N IA SOOOT
This thesis, written by
ERtCA Yei4Nt^6r HUAtiCr________
under the direction of h & C . Thesis Committee,
and approved by all its members, has been pre
sented to and accepted by the Dean of The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
M A S T 0? O F Fine A C T S
Date .AuguS-tL.. 13& 1.
>M M T THESIi
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fo r my parents
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many people have assisted me in this project, and I am more indebted to them than
I can say.
Heartfelt thanks go to my thesis committee at the University o f Southern
California: Ron Rizk, professor of drawing and painting as well as my committee chair,
whose clear-eyed, thoughtful critiques kept me honest about my work and its progress;
Ruth Weisberg, dean o f the School of Fine Arts, whose energy and spirit lifted me and
inspired me always to ask more of myself as a person as well as a painter; and Margit
Omar, professor of drawing and painting, who wisely counseled me to form questions that
i a painter must have to go on.
t
i
Special thanks go to Dr. John Walsh, director of The J. Paul Getty Museum for
finding time in his hectic schedule to guide me in my work. For his ever illuminating
i
\ advice I am extremely grateful.
Michael Chen, Lara Scott, Adrienne Su, Jan Tumlir, and Holly Vineyard graciously
endured various lurching stages of this thesis. Like my mentors they challenged and
encouraged me to clarify, rethink, and rewrite my way to a stronger, more probing paper.
Marshall Cohen, professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California, lent his
perceptive eye to an earlier essay in which this thesis is rooted.
[ Special mention goes to Phillip “Rick” Appell and all the students at Ocean View
; High School who so enlivened my experience. I could not have made these paintings
without you.
iii
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FB: . . . [it’s] always hopeless talking about painting—one never does
anything but talk around it— because if you could explain your
painting, you would be explaining your instincts.
DS: No, you can’t explain your painting, and nobody can explain their
own painting or any painting, but you can throw light on your
painting.
Francis Bacon with David Sylvester in one o fa series o f interviews
from 1971-1973'
A blacktop spanning twelve basketball courts at a local high school seems an
unlikely place for a painting easel. Yet for nine months—brush in hand—I have stationed
myself on an aging, fissured surface—a vast blacktop cracking, its white lines fading, its
goal posts offering bent, rusty hoops and tattered nets to an open sky. “Can I take a
picture of you?” a photography student once called out, aiming her Pentax at me. On a
separate occasion a soccer mom whose son was tending goal on an adjoining grass field
ventured near, confessing, “My friend and I have been sitting out there for ten minutes
watching you paint. We were both trying to figure out what you were looking at. Finally
I just had to come see for myself.. . . ” At other times students crossing the blacktop on
their way to class stopped to puzzle over my project, elbowing each other and whispering.
By documenting some of the internal and external circumstances that drove what
became a series of basketball court paintings I hope to trace for the viewer some of the
thoughts that surrounded the work and its making. In this task I am guided by Richard
Wollheim who writes:
The task of criticism is the reconstruction of the creative process
where the creative process must in turn be thought of as
something not stopping short o f but terminating on, the work of
art itself. The creative process reconstructed, or retrieval
complete, the work is then open to understanding.2
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!
t
Driving east on Warner Avenue from Golden West Street in Huntington Beach
you will see track and soccer fields on your right. Drive further and you will see a baseball
diamond, bike racks, and a vast corner parking lot. Soon you will spot a marquee for
Ocean View High School. Basketball courts lie in the distance beyond the parking lot.
You can see their half-moon backboards from the street.
I have driven past this high school for eight years on my way to work, on my way
to the gym, and on my way to the freeway. As a plein air landscape painter always
scouting locations for subject matter, I had developed a curiosity about this site, stealing
quick glances while driving by and taking any thirty-second looks that a red light might
allow. Only last summer, though, did I actually park my car and step outside to take a
longer look. The basketball goal posts stood solemnly, their backboards articulated only
by misshapen rusty hoops and a few nets—tom, dangling webs of dirty string. These
linear elements seemed to etch pictograms and alphabets into the sky. For weeks I filled
two notebooks with drawings of these calligraphic forms and then I began to paint them.
Soon, however, I found myself gazing down at the blacktop, struck by another graphic
system. I stared at painted lines that demarcated regions for jump balls and free throws.
My ga?e fell in and then out of bounds. A grid of numbers from one to seventy had been
painted on the surface of several courts, intermingling with, and at certain points,
intersecting the center and restraining circles as well as the free throw lines. I walked
among the numbers on one court, approaching the digits from various angles then backing
away from them. At one point I positioned myself two feet behind and parallel to the
division line so that the center circle narrowed to form an ellipse while the numbers came
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I
i
to rest on their sides. Suddenly a row of eights began to masquerade as a row of infinity
symbols. This metamorphosis sparked one of my early paintings.
Later I overheard the high school athletics director explain to a group of new
students that the numbers had been painted on the courts for roll-taking purposes. Each
student taking physical education was assigned a painted number and expected to occupy
that number at the beginning of each class. If you weren’t sitting on your number during
roll call you weren’t there—marked absent even if physically present. Flashback: hadn’t
I undergone the same ritual in junior high? Day after day I had dutifully seated myself
upon number thirteen at the beginning of Mrs. Nicholson’s p.e. class. I had forgotten.
Oh, I g et it. Look. S he's painting the numbers on the courts. See, here. . . and
here .... I looked up from my work one day to find a student hopping from one number
to another, his backpack swinging from his hand, explaining to his buddies the inspiration
for my activity.
Hey, you messed up!
No, you didn 7 .
The basketball courts at Ocean View see surprisingly little action. The pickup
games you might expect never seem to materialize. The courts are primarily the meeting
ground o f p.e. classes. After roll call the students disperse, heading for the track and
soccer fields or lugging their gear to the baseball diamond. Bereft of players, the courts
fall silent, their weathered numbers and boundaries quietly assuming a figurative role,
indicating perhaps a mournful absence through their residual presence.
First there’s the children’s house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
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The playthings in the playhouse o f the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.3
The above passage is taken from a Robert Frost poem titled “Directive.” Its lines
resonated instantly with me when I first read them last fall. When I discovered Frost’s
poem in the introduction to The Redress o f P oetry by Seamus Heaney, I clung to this
beautiful moment of witnessing that contemplates things broken and lost. I thought of the
basketball courts and the generations of students that had stood upon its now dilapidated
surface.
i Heaney’s reading of Frost’s lines held me in rapt attention, for it gave voice to a
*
1 sort of crossing-over that intrigued me—an interface where moments of the imaginary
; impinge upon moments of reality. In mourning the playhouse, Heaney finds, we moum
t
the real house:
Frost suggests .. . that life endured by the occupants of
the actual house finds its best memorial and expression
in the ‘house of make believe.’ He convinces us that the
playhouse has the measure of the other house, that the
entranced focus of the activity that took place as make
believe on one side of the yard was fit to match the
[ meaning of what happened in earnest on the other
|- side... .4
As I turned from Frost’s playhouse back to my own playground I cautioned myself
that any speculation of how circumstances on court might speak to the off-court had to
begin by looking and making. The paint had to hold the experience which would then
carry the idea.
4
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One day at the basketball courts I noticed an eleven on its side. After staring at it
for several minutes I made rapid sketches o f the number and the crack that ran through it.
I returned the next day and unfolded my easel. Up went a masonite panel cut from an
unsuccessful painting now hidden underneath a coat of Utrecht blue. I painted the two
boundary lines that lay above the eleven, the eleven itself (now looking more like an equal
sign), and a twelve (also resting on its side) that followed below. I centered the column of
numbers on my panel vertically as I saw them, tying them loosely to Chinese scroll
writing. A sort of osteoporosis had befallen the stenciled numbers. They looked brittle,
shattered. Using stiff bristle brushes I let my hands survey the visual rubble. With a larger
brush I explored the subtleties of the blacktop, using thin washes of ocher that lightly
veiled the bright blue underpainting. I did not worry about matching the color of the
blacktop. I found my blue field appealing. It seemed to reference water and therefore lent
; an ambiguity to the concept of surface. At two feet wide and three feet high, however, the
painting felt incomplete—a mere section of what needed to be a larger work. I decided to
add three more panels for a total of four. In Chinese four (si) is a near homonym for death
v
(si) and therefore considered unlucky; I wasn’t seeking death or ill fortune, but I was
seeking a sense of ending.
I returned to the courts with more blue panels and set up more rules: I would use
what I saw—neighboring multiples of eleven: a sideways twenty-two, thirty-three, and
forty-four—to head the remaining panels. I cheated at number forty-four, though,
substituting forty-three because it had wonderful ketchup stains—color and mark-making
possibilities that I couldn’t resist.
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I brought the panels home and arranged them in a long vertical on the ground floor
near the stairs. I went upstairs, leaned over the railing, and looked down. My twelve foot
work wasn’t going to be readable on a wall—not the top panels anyway. My dad joined
me at the top of the stairs. Then he went downstairs and switched panels three and four.
I pedaled down and placed the panels side by side: 11, 22, 43, 33.
at last? carried a pun as well as a prophetic question. My next attempt in the
series, numbered meadow, failed to fulfill the initial promise o f a wistful title I’d written on
a scrap of paper. I stood on the basketball courts with four green panels cut to the same
dimensions as at last?, envisioning a grassy counterpart that would hang on an opposing
waU— theyawg^ in answer to the yin of at last?, numbered meadow, however, lacked the
sense of exploration and discovery that had propelled at last?: my muddy brushwork
conveyed a lack of engagement and conviction. I scraped away at my efforts, yet traces of
my false starts remained. Perhaps this palimpsest will one day prove fertile.
Rick, a maintenance worker at the high school, stopped by regularly to say hello,
scratching his beard and narrowing his eyes as he studied whatever “op art” (as he
affectionately called it) happened to be propped upon my easel. ‘Taint fast,” he once
urged. “You see that track field out there? Well, the school’s selling off that whole
section. Gonna be a Home Depot. And these basketball courts? A bunch of ‘em—
pfHHHt—gone. The school wants new tennis courts. . . ”
One construction crane,
Three bulldozers on a field—
so quiet for now.
6
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ENDNOTES
‘David Sylvester, “Interview 3,” Interviews with Francis Bacon. 3rd ed. (Oxford:
Alden Press, 1995) 100.
^Richard Wollheim, “Criticism as Retrieval,” The Philosophy o f Art: Readings
Ancient and Modem, eds. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995)
405.
3 Robert Frost, “Directive,” The Poetry of Robert Frost ed. Edward Connery
Lathem (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997) 378.
4 Seamus Heaney, introduction, The Redress of Poetry, by Heaney (New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995) xv.
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WORKS CITED
Frost, Robert. “Directive.” The Poetry of Robert Frost. Ed. Edward Connery Lathem.
New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1979.
Heaney, Seamus. The Redress of Poetry. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995.
Sylvester, David. Interviews with Francis Bacon. 3rd ed. Oxford: Alden Press, 1995.
Wollheim, Richard. “Criticism and Retrieval.” The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient
and Modem. Eds. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995.
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Huang, Erica Yenning
(author)
Core Title
Elliptical Ground
School
Graduate School
Degree
Master of Fine Arts
Degree Program
Studio
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
Fine Arts,OAI-PMH Harvest
Language
English
Contributor
Digitized by ProQuest
(provenance)
Advisor
Rizk, Ron (
committee chair
), Omar, Margit (
committee member
), Weisberg, Ruth (
committee member
)
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-17059
Unique identifier
UC11342262
Identifier
1387821.pdf (filename),usctheses-c16-17059 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
1387821.pdf
Dmrecord
17059
Document Type
Thesis
Rights
Huang, Erica Yenning
Type
texts
Source
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Access Conditions
The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...
Repository Name
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Repository Location
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