Hand-signed by the artist, with title, date, and edition number inscribed in ink on an archival label affixed to the reverse side of the mounted photograph.
How big is this, or how deep? The picture will not say. A cluster of white cyclamen, each bloom marked with a hot magenta throat, floats at the center of a black field with no visible edge, no rim of a bowl, nothing to fix the scale. The dark could be a pond or a basin filled at the kitchen sink. What the frame withholds becomes the whole subject, and Harvey answers by giving us almost nothing except the flowers and the black.
What she does give is precisely placed. The flowers sit just above center, their petals swept back and half reflected, so the reading tips between rising and going under; the title says sinking, and the leaves, veined pale green, have already slipped below the surface. Fine specks of light hang in the water like a scatter of distant stars, a texture that turns the flat dark into something with depth and drift. The organization is simple and exact: one bright cluster, one enormous field of near-black, and the tension held between them.
Harvey made this near her home in Maine, and it belongs to the strain in her work where domestic still life edges toward something graver, gathered in the book Blue Violet and held in American museums. A potted cyclamen is an ordinary windowsill plant; set adrift in black water it becomes an image about mortality that never says so. The archival pigment print earns its place holding the deep blacks open, so the flecks stay legible and the magenta keeps its charge. It is organized so beauty and dread arrive in one glance.
How big is this, or how deep? The picture will not say. A cluster of white cyclamen, each bloom marked with a hot magenta throat, floats at the center of a black field with no visible edge, no rim of a bowl, nothing to fix the scale. The dark could be a pond or a basin filled at the kitchen sink. What the frame withholds becomes the whole subject, and Harvey answers by giving us almost nothing except the flowers and the black.
What she does give is precisely placed. The flowers sit just above center, their petals swept back and half reflected, so the reading tips between rising and going under; the title says sinking, and the leaves, veined pale green, have already slipped below the surface. Fine specks of light hang in the water like a scatter of distant stars, a texture that turns the flat dark into something with depth and drift. The organization is simple and exact: one bright cluster, one enormous field of near-black, and the tension held between them.
Harvey made this near her home in Maine, and it belongs to the strain in her work where domestic still life edges toward something graver, gathered in the book Blue Violet and held in American museums. A potted cyclamen is an ordinary windowsill plant; set adrift in black water it becomes an image about mortality that never says so. The archival pigment print earns its place holding the deep blacks open, so the flecks stay legible and the magenta keeps its charge. It is organized so beauty and dread arrive in one glance.