Sonia Gechtoff's Perception Of Beauty

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Cliche as it may be, this maxim holds true throughout the world, whether it be in regards to celebrities, cars, rural lanscapes, gritty cityscapes, your co-worker’s children, or your father-in-law’s turkey carving skills. Holding differing points of view in regards to what is considered beauty is something that humanity has argued over for centuries. What one sees as merely a rundown subway car, another may see the small sparks of creativity in the walls’ grafitti, the colorful bursts of commuters’ clothing, the sheer beauty of humanity itself in the hidden spaces of the train. Discussions over what is truly beautiful are common throughout humanity’s history, though nowhere are they as obvious or as well documented as they are in the art world.
Sonia Gechtoff is known for her abstract expressionist painitings and drawings, a genre that, for many, you either love or hate. For me, it’s works like hers that allow me to enjoy a style of paininting that I’m not otherwise drawn to. Though I enjoy her work, her paintings may not be considered beautiful in the traditional sense by many.

They are, for the most part, sweeping abstract reimaginings of the sea, of herself, of country landscapes, of cities, of the world she inhabits. Her use of colors can be jarring and the way her brushstrokes meander through her canvases is at times both choppy and unifying, as if each stroke is another swell of water readying to crash through larger wave. But it is through this chaos that something beautiful shines.
Her 1958 oil painting Etya looms large from the whitewashed wall in the Oakland Museum on which it resides. It stretches over nine feet tall and five feet across, but its physical size isn’t what makes it stand out amongst a gallery full of some of the best pieces of art to come out of California. Etya’s presence reaches out from the center of the canvas, a harsh fireworklike burst of color from what is otherwise a black background. White wisps up from the bottom edge of the painting, as if snow is framing a lanscape above which a titanic fireball has just burst through the sky. Oranges battle with reds for dominicence in the center of the paining as the surounding black drags the edges of the firery colors down towards the ghostly white lining the bottom of the canvas.
Etya reminds me of the thrill of I felt at midnight on New Year’s Eve as a child, standing out on a cold street as the dark winter sky stretched over me, knowing something big is coming, but not being quite sure what. And just as the harsh crack of fireworks distracted mme from my frozen nose and chattering teeth, Etya’s contrast of firery movement and a stationary void pulls me from the dark, quiet edges of the work into the cacaphony of colors that resides further in.
Gechtoff’s use of scale works well in this piece, as does her medium.

Using such a largge canvas gave her room to lay out a background of solid black dotted with small streaks of white, without making the outward reaching tangle of colors in the center feel too claustrophobic. Instead,the size givs it a sense of distance, as if we’re watching an explosion from a ways away, rather than being caught up in the middle of a blazing firestorm; close enough for it to feel personal, but not enough to be threatening. And her choice of oil lends itself as well - such a frantic sense of movement wouldnt have been as well articulated through something like watercolor. Oil paints have a sense of weight and depth to them rthat lets Etya seem to have a depth to it, despite being an abstract painting with no true figures within to give a sense of three dimesionality

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