Senecca Salameh

Block F

November 16, 2015

Fractured Worlds

Imagine a painting that depicts a broken world that is built and reformed again into a

series of divided and gapped planes. There is a deep and chasmic white space amongst these

planes, causing the viewer to almost skip over these spaces and jump from the different surfaces

in the painting. The man behind these watercolor paintings is Frederick C. Graff, an Ohio-based

creator whose artwork consists of intense planes and blank spaces.

The way that Graff begins his painting is similar to a vignette, a quality that constantly

captures his eye. Graff possesses a liking for mixing together intense and focused areas with

openly painted sections while adding in a vignette border. He enjoys adding in areas that sharply

mark the figures with less contrasting ones which all make up for a free and open landscape. The

origin of a painting begins with a sketch, that consist of lines that are muted purposefully

divided, adding a connote a feeling of depth and noise between the intense forms, which often

spark an interest among the viewers. Graff will create several preceding studies and readings

before he decides what he wants to do with his paintings. He typically makes his sketch final by

developing it with a round sable brush, which is size 7, and a flat 1-inch wash brush. When Graff

begins to paint, it is always free and fluctuating. It provides the space for the artist to paint

something new, a release, without having to translate his sketch into something that is “in

between the lines”.

To commence his work, picks a surface. He generally turns his attention to smoother and

flatter, making it easier for the paint to move around. The surfaces he likes to use are the
Strathmore 500 Series heavyweight hot-pressed illustration board and YUPO 144-lb.

heavyweight paper. He leaves paint in a transparent manner, stressing the natural white portions

of the paper. As for his brushes, sable or natural/synthetic blends are those he feels to be the most

efficient for putting more layers atop of other layers. The watercolors by M.Graham are ones that

Graff appeals to since they remain damp on the palette. He dries his YUPO paintings in the sun

and then applies a minimum amount of three coats of Kylon UV-Resistant Clear Gloss Acrylic

spray. Despite the seemingly unpredictable nature of Graff’s work, he applies the colors and the

patterns depending on his feeling towards the painting. He requires himself to maintain the

balance of the colors and the whites, to keep it as the center focus. However, he does not make

each pattern the same, but treat them as different shapes and forms that express the outline of the

subjects. Graff actually begins the artwork by a negative painting process, by defining and

making the dark areas known first, working light to dark by starting on the dark side. He

purposefully leaves and spatial areas to leave an abstract characteristic to the painting. All of the

fragments all make up surface planes that “creates the feeling of fractured space.”

Personally, I enjoy the Frederick’s work, but not enough to buy them for my home or

anything of that nature. I haven’t heard of his technique before (the negative painting process) so

I actually found that really interesting. The colors and the different geometric like shapes of the

images really do give off a fractured space which I find really alluring and almost fun and

vivacious to look at.