Ross Bleckner

Ross Bleckner’s piece titled The Arrangement of Things is an abstract painting that can be found in the MFA’s Art of the Americas gallery. It was created between 1982 and 1985. Staying true to the Op art, or optical art, movement, Bleckner here breaks away from his usual hard-edged vocabulary to infuse colored shapes into the canvas, interrupting the geometry. His use of contrast and scale in this painting help him to investigate change, loss and memory.

Ross Bleckner was born in 1949 and lives in New York City. In the last 20 years, his work has been focused on change, memory, and loss, often addressing the subject of AIDS. He uses symbolic imagery rather than direct representation, and his work is visually elusive, with shapes that often

In this regard, the painting seems to be bottom-heavy, with more density along the bottom half. The largest occurrence of color is near the bottom center: a sort of baby blue cloud that appears to be behind the black lines. It is very splotchy but when one looks closer, there is also a stripy or scratchy vertical pattern in the blue, suggesting the blue was applied in certain areas and then brushed or scraped off vertically to expand it, a technique Bleckner often used, letting some white peak through in the form of lines. Along the bottom edge, square-shaped blurry purple-brown forms appear, evenly spaced, creating a ground, base or frame for the entire image. Other splotches of color are treated in the same way as the blue ‘cloud’ but smaller and more concentrated. There are 21 of these stains with colors ranging from yellow-green to turquoise, passing by red, pink, purple, blue, forest green, lime green orange, and mustard. There is a great diversity of color, possibly referencing the main symbol of the gay rights movement, which Bleckner was actively a part of, the rainbow. The basic shape of the stains seems to be circular but their color is also expanded vertically, fading gradually. Their appearance of floating orbs creates an atmosphere hanging over the