A Black and Blue Bomb

At first a blurry amalgamation of dark shapes, but no! A foreground and a background quickly materialize before me. In the background: horizontal lines, if you can call them lines. More appropriately they may be described as fuzzy shifts from dark blues to grim grays, or rather, when studied closer, an intense vertical zigzagging like the image on a hyper-active heart monitor. The highest stripe is the lightest in color, perhaps suggesting a sky. Below it lays a much darker stripe with a heavily pointed top, perhaps suggesting a shadowy tree line. Below that, is a flat, lighter stripe that my brain morphs into a grassy (or icy) field.

But this, this is the background. The foreground is what draws my eye. A massive, vertical…well, something swells from the lowest field-like stripe and continues upward without border off the top of the canvas. The conspicuous something has a nearly black base, darker than any other color in the image, and a nearly white top, lighter than any other color in the image. I didn’t know what to make of it, so I glanced at the title for a clue. “Japanese Landscape,” it was called. A moment later my interpretation clicked. This object at the center, so I perceived, was an exploding atom bomb! The artist, Felrath Hines, would have been a young adult at the time of the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. An African American artist deeply rooted in the Civil Rights movement later in his life, I understood this bleak portrayal of what appeared to be an exploding atom bomb as a meditation on the feeling of hopelessness in the face of oppression, of a question of purpose in the face of something so powerful, and of a deep despair at the bigotry and bullying so ingrained in the history of our world.

With the awkwardness-insensitive security guard’s eyes constantly keeping an eye on me, I studied Hines’ image in Chapel Hill’s Ackland Art Museum for nearly half an hour. As I contemplated the piece before me, I moved from one side of the nearly seven foot canvas to the other. I moved from within inches to the other side of the room yards and yards away. I squinted my eyes. I turned my head sideways. I even lay on the nearest bench and looked at it upside down. No matter what angle I view it from, the most pervasive element is a deficit of color. There are no pinks, yellows, or oranges, only blacks, blues and grays. The colors one might see on a rainy day or during an icy winter. While making use of very few colors of the rainbow, however, no two shades are exactly alike—(glance) yup; the security guard is still watching me. The lack of detail and the blurredness of borders delineate a general lack of definition. But the focus is at center-stage, where the giant blob blocks out everything behind it. The contrasting halves within the blob have borders different from the rest of the painting. Instead of the equivalent of paint-brush “chicken-scratch” the distinctions here are much more crisp and blunt in comparison. Finally, the top of the blob is unseen beyond the canvas suggesting that the figure doesn’t end there. The longer I studied, the more these visual clues began to coalesce and I began to delve into a more interpretive level of thinking.

First off, the dreary palette of colors generated a bleak, almost depressing sentiment. This, coupled with the all around indefinite nature of the painting, was unsettling and presented me with a lack of satisfaction, as I didn’t know what to make of it. Nonetheless, the sense of space and contrasting colors (light and dark) lends itself to an outdoor setting. With this schematic framework in mind, the artist’s intentions become clearer. As the title suggests, the image is of a landscape (this is very difficult to know for sure based on observation alone). What then, is the giant shape in the center? Why is the landscape a Japanese landscape? The fact that the object continues upward out of the frame gives me the impression that the object is rising. The object is also hourglass-shaped, and is divided into two highly contrasting colors. Could these not be fire and smoke? Is an hourglass-cloud too far off from a mushroom-cloud? I took these leaps of logic and found that yes, for the most part, this interpretation held firm when super-imposed onto the objective collection of observations. Finally, as the bombings in Japan are perhaps the darkest days in its history, I thus concluded the object in the center to be an atom bomb.

But why an atom bomb, what social commentary or aesthetic goal is Hines attempting to reach? The most obvious answer is that he is attempting to engender a sense of despair in his viewers. An atom bomb is one of the most destructive forces on the planet, and watching one erupt on a peoples’ homeland will never be a pleasant experience for a sane person with a sympathetic heart. A force so awesome is hard to reckon with, and once it is detonated, annihilation is a virtual certainty. Thus with despair comes hopelessness. What can one do against something so callous and uncompromising? This leads one to question whether peace is attainable, whether your life and your cause were for naught. Finally, once you question the sound of your voice, of your right to be heard and your ability to speak up instead of blown up, you become pessimistic about the human race, about our violent history and our ever-oppressive manipulations. You wonder if it will ever end.

As history plays out, and mankind struggles with conflict after conflict, Hines is recognizing the internal pessimism a good-hearted man feels in times of hardship, the part that wants to break down and cry because prevailing seems futile. By doing this he is illustrating the very face of his enemy, so that he can look it in the face, and deny its influence. He is exorcising his demons, giving them a face so that he can distinguish them from himself. He is speaking to his viewers, not only through his painting but also by his actions in life. Despite the obstacles he faced, Mr. Hines was a resilient member of the Civil Rights Movement, and progress has been made. The bomb may be scary, but if your cause is noble, you will never be for naught.

“I never could figure out exactly what that was supposed to be,” a voice from behind me said. It was the security guard, breaking our uncomfortable half-hour silence.

I smiled, slightly amused. “Neither can I,” I said, but I had an idea.