Tropical Noon

Bernard Childs

At the end of the 1960s Childs began experimenting with the manipulation of light, creating a series of sculptures constructed of engraved sheets of acrylic lit from below. His preoccupation with light continued into the 1970s on the plate, particularly with images of sunsets. Here, he cleverly portrays air, sea, and land in a deceptively simple composition featuring a crab. Its red from dances its way across a subtly-hued color field that ranges from tangerine to emerald. The suggestion of surface is created through its reflection, rendered in the rippled lines like those imprinted on sand in the wake of a departing wave. Two plates are used to portray this tropical choreography, with the thin, uninked line between them providing the horizon.