He has swung his head down and to the left, ears falling forward, eyes lowered toward some private disappointment on the turquoise floor. The gesture is the whole picture: a big grey Weimaraner caught in the act of looking away, folding into himself while the studio around him blazes. Whatever the dog is on edge about, he keeps to himself, chin dropped, gaze angled off the frame, the picture of an afternoon that has not gone as planned.
The color, meanwhile, refuses to sulk with him. Behind the animal, flat zones of vermilion, burnt orange and rust collide along hard diagonals, and a sheet of translucent blue lies across the lower half like tinted glass, staining his haunches and forepaws a cool teal while his shoulders stay warm grey. It is a strange, lovely bit of trickery, the dog half dyed by a color that is not his, seated at the seam where the hot upper world meets the cold lower one.
The title jokes about being on edge, and the whole design conspires to keep him there, wedged between blocks of color that will not let him settle. Since the 1970s the artist has photographed his Weimaraners with a straight face and an experimenter’s curiosity, and here the experiment is chromatic: what happens to a grey dog when you filter him. As a pigment print the answer stays exact, the reds unmuddied, the teal genuinely cool, the fur holding its silver through the tint. A melancholy dog in a designer’s paradise, and none of it his idea.
He has swung his head down and to the left, ears falling forward, eyes lowered toward some private disappointment on the turquoise floor. The gesture is the whole picture: a big grey Weimaraner caught in the act of looking away, folding into himself while the studio around him blazes. Whatever the dog is on edge about, he keeps to himself, chin dropped, gaze angled off the frame, the picture of an afternoon that has not gone as planned.
The color, meanwhile, refuses to sulk with him. Behind the animal, flat zones of vermilion, burnt orange and rust collide along hard diagonals, and a sheet of translucent blue lies across the lower half like tinted glass, staining his haunches and forepaws a cool teal while his shoulders stay warm grey. It is a strange, lovely bit of trickery, the dog half dyed by a color that is not his, seated at the seam where the hot upper world meets the cold lower one.
The title jokes about being on edge, and the whole design conspires to keep him there, wedged between blocks of color that will not let him settle. Since the 1970s the artist has photographed his Weimaraners with a straight face and an experimenter’s curiosity, and here the experiment is chromatic: what happens to a grey dog when you filter him. As a pigment print the answer stays exact, the reds unmuddied, the teal genuinely cool, the fur holding its silver through the tint. A melancholy dog in a designer’s paradise, and none of it his idea.